We reviewed more than 180 shows at the 2005
Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. We originally spread them over several
pages, but have squeezed them onto two for this archive. They're in
alphabetical order (solo performers by last name), A to L on this page,
M to Z on a second.Scroll down for what you
want, or just browse.

Absence and
PresenceSt Stephen's - If you are after quality
rather than pizzazz, then this imaginative yet mature, accomplished,
understated, heartfelt and entertaining piece of visual theatre has got
to be at the top of your list. 21 years after co-founding Mime Theatre
Project, Andrew Dawson is coming of age in a number of ways, though not
all of them a reason for celebration. This is also the twentieth
anniversary of his father's death, and he has decided to confront his
demons, including the fact that his father's body lay undiscovered for
ten days. In a rather sparse and slow exposition, Dawson reads extracts
from personal letters while also introducing a range of non-verbal
narratives concerning a moth, a wire man on a chair, and samples of
video footage of an old man's belongings. Grief carries its own laws,
and this documentary display will be forgiven the moment Dawson embarks
on telling us his story the way he knows best - in mime and movement,
shining a light on his sorrow, embodying an elderly postman as he
dances to the radio, fishingfor poignant metaphors, playing with
shadows on the wall, and weaving it all together into a heart-warmingly
beautiful etude on parental love and loss. Duska
Radosavljevic

After the EndTraverse - Those who have read
my review of The Night Shift are about to experience a bit of deja vu.
Dennis Kelly's new play for the touring Paines Plough company opens as
a young man carries an unconscious girl into a bomb shelter left over
from the Cold War and explains, when she awakes, that there's been a
terrorist nuclear bomb. He's a nerd who has loved her from afar - and
hands up, those who can't write the rest of the play. Chances are that
your version will include someone wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons,
someone hearing voices outside, someone being chained to a bed, and a
knife changing hands a couple of times. Take away the rather
half-hearted attempt to make it timely with the reference to
terrorists, and you have a not-especially-good TV movie from the 1950s.
The only slightly original touch is the discovery at the end that the
greatest trauma for her was not anything that went on in the shelter,
but living for a while with the belief that all her loved ones were
dead outside. Tom Brooke tries to pretend he believes in a character
who is nothing but a walking cliche, and Kerry Condon does her best
with a character who is not defined at all. (To be fair, the printed
text includes whole chunks of dialogue cut in performance that would
have provided more of a back story and sense of who these people are,
though they would not have solved the central problem of the hackneyed
premise and plot.) Gerald Berkowitz

All in the Timing Assembly
Rooms
- Peepolykus (John Nicholson, David Sant, Javier Marzan) seem to come
with a kind of extended warranty. You always have, and you probably
always will like them, whatever they do. This time they've picked David
Ives' award-winning play, often seen at the Fringe in American student
productions over the last ten years. None of them can do the American
accents, but at least we do get a masterclass in comic timing promised
in the title, even when things go wrong and we all just wait for the
technical team to arrive to our rescue. Ives' play is actually a series
of thematically interlinked sketches about beginnings and endings,
featuring chimp-literati, Polish funeral maids, the Lindbergh baby and
even Leon Trosky (complete with an axe in his skull). John Nicholson
excels in his female impersonations, while Sant and Marzan make even
the scene changes look like ballet. And with a lego-style set, this
show has one of the most ingenius set of scene changes around.
Duska Radosavljevic

All Wear
Bowlers St. Stephen's - Seated on a couple
of chairs wrenched from the auditorium, a couple of Didi and Gogo
lookalikes (Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford) are staring at us pitifully,
as though we are the show. 'I don't get it' confesses one of them
surreptitiously. 'Avant garde!' growls the other indignantly,
underlining it with a gesture which indicates a label. This year's
word-of-mouth Fringe hit is the kind of avant garde show that is
nonetheless an evident crowd-pleaser. Combining an immensely playful
audience rapport with a kind of melancholy homage to both Beckett and
the silver screen, All Wear Bowlers looks like a really successful
result of a series of experiments. Where so many similar projects have
repeatedly failed - including the use of film on the stage, close up
magic and the bid for originality - this one repeatedly succeeds. It
almost re-invents clowning without trying to re-invent the wheel. As an
extra bonus, the show has theatrical depth too. It is a Beckettian kind
of existentialist theatricality - concerning the notion of entrapment -
with our heroes lost in no man's land between the screen and the real
world. Still, they make the time pass like a couple of kids in a brand
new playroom, giving us much cause for delight as well. Duska
Radosavljevic

Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su JardinC Central - Garcia Lorca's 'Love of
Don Perlimplin...' is a subtly subversive work. It sets up a classic
romantic farce situation - an old man with a cold young wife invents a
mysterious young suitor to get her romantic juices flowing - and then
unexpectedly but logically takes it in a tragic direction. This
production from Spain's Baraka Theatre captures both the play's whimsy
and high passions beautifully, despite the handicaps of a condensed
text that perforce cuts much of the milieu and reduces the main
characters to brief sketches, and performances in Spanish (with
excellent English surtitles). Mimed sprites, live musicians and
interpolated dance sequences all help establish the play's shifting
moods and support the strong central performances, particularly that of
Luis Ignacio Gonzalez Camarero as a Don who is both foolish and deeply
unhappy. Gerald Berkowitz

AntigoneQuaker Meeting Hall - Jean Anouilh's
Antigone is one of the very best of all modern takes on Greek tragedy,
as Anouilh filters the play through a mid-20th-century sensibility
without violating its spirit or meanings. Indeed, he enhances them, by
making his single-actor Chorus fully aware of the literary and
philosophical implications of tragedy, and offering what amounts to a
masterclass in those meanings as he comments on the action. Anouilh
also turns the central debate between Antigone and Creon into one of
the most exciting pieces of talk-as-drama this side of Shaw. And the
best thing I can say about this production by Durham-based Captain
Theatre is that they don't get too much in the way of the play's
strengths. They sure do try, though, with director Hanna Wolf
cluttering it up with a gratuitously busy set, face paintings, clumsy
staging, portentous and ponderous soap-opera acting, and just about
everything else she could think of to stand between the play and the
audience. One example at random - the essential clear voice of the
Chorus is muddled by dividing the part, and the lines, between two
performers who live in what look like giant shopping bags when not
speaking. And is there something in the water in Durham? Half the cast,
including Antigone, Creon and one of the Choruses, speak with lisps,
which is more than noticeable when they have to keep talking about
Ithmene, Polyntheth and Oediputh. Gerald Berkowitz

Art of TravelC Venue -
Using movement to express narrative is harder than it seems and it is
rare to find a company that not only is successful in this respect but
also does it so instinctively. Inspired by Alain de Botton's
philosophy-lite bestseller of the same name, Kali Dass has created a
series of scenes that follow a couple as they leave the grey shores of
Britain for a sun-drenched Caribbean island. Do they find happiness or
do they bring with them the world they thought was left behind them?
Evocative projections of clips alternatively provide backgrounds for
the action or add characters to the live performers. In one memorable
sequence, as the couple mime videoing each other as they samba, the
screen behind them displays real images of the imaginary camera's eye.
Likewise evocative music is used to underpin the thread of narrative.
Arun Ghosh's clarinet-based musical soundscapes reflect the different
styles while maintaining a united beat that holds them all together.
Dancers Dass, Lucy Bannon and Magdalen Gorringe work together fluidly,
continually surprising with the fusion of Indian and Western styles ­
made all the more entrancing with the added layers of traditional and
modern elements. If there is a criticism it is that the dancers have
quite different approaches to their movement and so, rather than the
duets, they work best in the solo pieces and the more chorus-like
ensembles. Nick Awde

Aruba Pleasance - Fast-paced and
energetic, with barely any use of props or scenery, Aruba is a
threefold (Ben Lewis, Kieran Fay, Sophie Fletcher) character study
about urban living and human isolation. Although rooted in Lecoq, the
company's style is less flashy and more fleshy than is to be expected
from similarly inclined projects. This is People Can Run's second
project together and they are definitely on the right track in their
bid for gold. If you're new to their work, it won't take too long for
this attractive trio to grab your attention and imagination, and before
you know it you'll be up for not only a trip to Aruba with them but
even to the end of the world. It is a fun ride showing you entire
cityscapes of beauty and wilderness and zooming in on three lonely
specimens at the risk of extinction. Although dramaturgically
accomplished, their show is not without technical glitches this year,
but People Can Run have a lot of energy, determination and an excellent
sense of humour which will keep them ahead of the race for many years
to come. Duska Radosavljevic

BaconPleasance - Painter Francis
Bacon, known for his violently distorted bodies, characteristically
refuses to explain himself in this solo show by Pip Utton, but Utton
characteristically brings us fully into the man even as he is
attempting to hide. As writer and performer, Utton's mode is to allow
the painter to display the public masks he is comfortable behind and
then let flashes of anger or other passions expose what's beneath. So
his Bacon introduces himself in the guise of a bitchy queen in full
Quentin Crisp mode, growing unexpectedly serious when talk shifts to
his painting, which he speaks of as hand-to-hand combat with the
subject, the medium and the viewer. That self-exposure made, and a
considerable quantity of champagne quaffed, he is a little less
guarded, and gradually the revelations about his sexual masochism and
his need to capture the violence in the human form come together in a
view of life as defined by its most intense and painful seconds.
There's a lot of humour along the way, and perhaps some things to shock
the most sheltered, but the power of the work, as with all Utton's
self-written solo pieces, is in the solid reality he creates and the
subtlety with which he brings us surprisingly deep into the character. Gerald
Berkowitz

Bad Play 3 C venue -
The skilfully created illusion of amateur clumsiness is a Fringe
staple, rarely done with more polish and elan than in this fast-moving
show that only slightly comes down to earth when an ecological moral is
tacked on. The three-man company - Jeremy Limb, Paul Litchfield and Dan
Mersh - play all the roles in a dystopic science fiction story of an
ecologically ruined future Earth in which men live underground as
slaves to robot masters. The fun comes in the mix of outlandish
premises ('Our story begins, as all good stories do, with a robotic
hoverwolf....') and the pretense of missed cues, recalcitrant light and
sound effects, and a growing desperation in actors forced to ad lib
their way through the performance minefield. Set pieces along the way
include an all-purpose politician-bot able to mouth platitudes from
across the political spectrum with the turn of a switch and a potted
history of the large and small disasters facing the Earth in the next
thousand years, while the occasional suspicion that a bit of the
making-it-up-as-they-go-along panic might be real just draws the
audience in to the collaborative in-joke spirit. The ecological message
is a bit awkwardly dragged in, but fortunately is not allowed to
interrupt the comic rhythm or spoil the fun. Gerald Berkowitz

Basic Training Gilded
Balloon Teviot - There is actually
little that is unique or even especially dramatic in Kahlil Ashanti's
autobiographical story, but the personality, versatility and intense
energy of the performer make it one of the most entertaining and
satisfying hours on the fringe. Ashanti joined the American Air Force
but, after a few weeks of basic training, spent his entire tour of duty
in the entertainment corps, touring bases around the world as a
stand-up comic and occasional singer-dancer-stagehand. Providing a
dramatic counterpoint to this upbeat experience was the fact that his
mother told him the night before he left that the abusive man of the
house wasn't his real father, but refused to help his ongoing attempt
to learn more. In telling both stories, Ashanti plays himself and a few
dozen other characters, from the loving mother and angry stepfather to
a crusty sergeant and a camp entertainer, in a virtuoso display of his
range and gusto. Since it is all true, perhaps only a curmudgeon will
notice a hint of audience manipulation when, within the last ten
minutes, he performs for a dying girl, defrosts his hard-nosed
sergeant, stands up to his stepfather, liberates his mother, discovers
that the girl's cancer has disappeared, and finally meets his father. Gerald
Berkowitz

Bed of Roses
Love CafeSweet on the Grassmarket - As far as
performance poetry goes, I bet you haven't been to a gig before where
the poet did a cartwheel on stage or invited you into her bed. Well, at
least not in front of everyone else. The quality of Sally Crabtree's
poetry and songs almost takes a backseat to the accompanying experience
that she creates for her listeners. There are fairy lights and fairy
cakes, flowers and feathers; everything's pink, of course, sweet and
delicate - a little girl's heaven! But it doesn't go as far as theatre
either. Her audience rapport is positive and there is a game of bingo
on the go. You do get a sense of being at play with her while she
chatters through her teenage-style lyrics of love, displaying her shoes
and handbags and hand-made glittering artefacts. However, if she
intends to build on this cozy idea, she'd certainly do well to get
herself a director who would make dramaturgical sense of it all, or at
least teach her how to pace and project herself more effectively. Duska
Radosavljevic

David Benson's Conspiracy CabaretAssembly Rooms - Personable and
multitalented David Benson is not so much interested in conspiracy
theories - though he does fill us in on the current inside dirt on
Diana and 9/11 - as on the world that generates them. Quite
insightfully, as well as wittily, he spots that the paranoid insistence
that there are hidden connections to all things is a neurotic twin to
modern science's search for a unified theory to explain everything, and
that in turn leads to a sparkling song, worthy of Noel Coward, about
string theory. That pattern runs through this very entertaining hour -
an astute observation on the contemporary world being carried in an
unexpected direction and possibly concluded in song. He is an
actor-who-sings rather than a singer - that is, he hits all the right
notes in a pleasant baritone, but without a singer's fullness of tone -
but that mode is wholly appropriate to this intimate and informal
performance. Indeed, with a performer of less natural charm and
personality than Benson, the hour might seem thin, but it is as much
the pleasure of his company as what he has to say that carries the
show. Gerald Berkowitz

Beyond Midnight Pleasance - Trestle began as a
mask-and-mime company with none of the preciousness that description
may suggest. Using full head masks with expressions so neutral that the
performers' body language could make them seem to change, they told
thoroughly delightful comic and tragicomic tales in a performance
vocabulary that was new and unique. A few years ago, though, the
company decided they had taken that particular style as far as they
could, and began looking for ways to translate their skills into new
forms. Their experiments have been very uneven, and this latest show
demonstrates that they still have not found the new mode they've been
looking for. A dark sequel to Cinderella finds the princess dead and
her grown daughter undergoing a series of adventures in search of her
own prince. The actress playing the princess is barefaced, her father
wears a half-mask, the new version of the ugly sisters are in old-style
Trestle heads, and a bird who befriends the heroine has a mask-hat. The
physical appearances and the performance styles they generate clash
with each other, the story's anti-romantic tone is sometimes quite
unpleasant, and - worst of all theatrical sins - the show is just dull
and lifeless. Old fans of Trestle continue to wish them well and hope
they'll find their way to something as thrilling as their old mode. But
this isn't it.Gerald Berkowitz

The Bicycle
Men Underbelly - Pure delicacy, pure
delight, pure undiluted madness! I mean, I can't even think back to
this show, written and performed by Dave Lewman, Joe Liss, Mark Nutter
and John Rubano, without breaking into fits of laughter. The concept is
quite simple - an American tourist has lost his bike in the French
countryside and embarks on a strange journey of cultural clashes and
discoveries. Translated in stage terms it means a wannabe Broadway star
finds himself in a really good improv comedy about a journey through
the European theatre genres, including corporeal mime, puppetry,
slapstick comedy, more puppetry, theatre of the absurd and - puppetry.
In a way, it is a micro-version of the Fringe itself. But saying
anything like 'if you can see one show this year, make it this one'
would be just a euphemism for what should really be obligatory viewing
everywhere from Bruxelles to DC. Not that there's anything politically
relevant in this show where Dutch students lull themselves to sleep
with loud Japanese folk songs and, even less tastefully, excrement is
paraded on food trays - but it is such an exquisitely funny and
well-timed feel-good piece that it has something for every possible
cultural inclination around. Duska Radosavljevic

BlackbirdKing's Theatre - A young woman and a
much older man are alone in a workplace staff room at the end of the
day. They are both clearly uncomfortable in each other's presence, and
yet they remain where they are, trapped by an unexplained bond. Without
giving too much of the story away, we soon discover that Ray was
convicted and jailed after he ran away with Una when she was only 12
years old. Fifteen years later, he is still trying to forget but she
feels a desire to reconnect. David Harrower's play is a trail of
speculation, a 'what if' scenario based largely on his own imagination.
He blatantly uses every trick in the book to build up to the various
denouements and flashpoints in the couple's story, but ultimately it
boils down to an arrogant academic exercise. After all, there are more
appropriate devices than the rape and kidnap of a child to dissect the
struggle for domination between the sexes or offer fantasies of sexual
submission to a secretly titilated Middle England. Except perhaps for
Una's short pink skirt, there is no sign whatsoever of director Peter
Stein's hand. That the play is a success is thanks entirely to Jodhi
May and Roger Allam's awesome stamina - despite a shaky first ten
minutes or so, they sustain their roles, holding the audience's
attention throughout. No mean feat when you consider that this is a
leaden two-hander of two hours with no interval and set in a single
room. If you find an appeal in Nabakov's similarly self-justifactory
Lolita, then you'll just love the sequel served up here. If, however,
you're looking for answers to intelligently posed dilemmas, you'll come
away cheated by writer, director and producer. Nick Awde

The Booth Variations
Assembly Rooms - Edwin Booth was the
greatest American actor of the Nineteenth Century. But he was also the
son of the man who had been the greatest American actor of the
Nineteenth Century, and brother of the man who killed Lincoln. And so,
in this play written by Todd Cerveris and Caridad Svich, and performed
by Cerveris with Tom Butler, Booth is a man never certain of his own
identity and therefore fascinated by the ways in which our perceptions
of others are generated. Booth began as backstage assistant to his
father, a very artificial and stylized performer, and thought, when he
began acting, that he was merely copying his father, gesture for
gesture. And yet the world saw in him a passion and realism that he had
no idea he was generating. Violating reality to allow Booth to employ
modern technology, the play lets him run a videotape of someone (also
played by Cerveris) talking, and point out that we, the audience, will
watch that tape and invest it with significance just because it is in
that box, just as we will focus on him just because he's the one in the
spotlight. That the boy in the box turns out to be an innocent
accomplice of John Wilkes Booth compounds the ironies as Booth intends,
because now, no matter what he says, we will look at him as the
assassin's brother. Very much a play about theatre as much as it is
about Booth, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking hour.
Gerald Berkowitz

Boston MarriageC Central - David Mamet, peerless
chronicler of the obscene language of men, allowed himself a holiday in
this all-female play written in a lushly epigrammatic style reminiscent
of Oscar Wilde. The two central characters, cultured 19th-century
American lesbians, never use one word when five finely-crafted ones
will do, and the fun of the play lies in watching them work their way
through the plot (which has to do with one of them wanting permission
for a fling on the side) without ever ruffling their linguistic
feathers. But to work, the play wants to be played as if it were The
Importance of Being Earnest, allowing actors and audiences to savour
every witticism. It may be the constraints of Fringe schedules that led
Tom Littler, director of the Oxford-based Primavera Company, to speed
things up so that his lead actresses, Caroline Dyott and Victoria Ross,
race through the dialogue at gabble-approaching speed. But it certainly
was a directorial decision to play both women as more catty and less
elegant than their language would suggest. Both women make what they
can out of the direction they are given, but it is not just that the
smaller role of the maid is written to steal every scene she's in that
leads me to spot the strongest actress in the bunch in Lily Sykes. Gerald
Berkowitz

Breakfast at
Audrey'sGilded Balloon Teviot - Audrey Hepburn,
avatar of a specific sort of beauty and elegance for a generation, was
as much an artificial creation as her two most famous roles, Holly
Golightly and Eliza Doolittle. Like them, she came from very
unglamorous roots and consciously recreated herself, though at some
cost. And playwright John Binnie sees the strain of building and
sustaining that new self as an acrobatic performance, placing a trapeze
centre stage and calling for an acrobat-actress to play Audrey. With
the determined stage mother played by Cara Kelly driving her, Philippa
Vafadari swings and balances as the starving Dutch WWII refugee who
used her thinness and affected elegance to create an alternative icon
to the pneumatic blondes of the Monroe era. The play itself strains a
bit to connect Hepburn's image to the anorexia of a contemporary
Scottish teenager (also played by Vafadari, with Kelly as her loving
mother), and to explain Hepburn's second career as a UN ambassador
publicising world starvation as penance for having promoted slimness as
a beauty goal. It is at its best in the earlier transformation
sequences, as we see the iconic persona being shaped. Gerald
Berkowitz

Breath(e)Traverse - Intended to appeal to
all the senses, this audio-visual installation directed and designed by
Steve Lucas with original music by Steve Marsh and breathing by Jane
Miller, with palpable reverb and copious amounts of smoke, could very
well have happened in any modern art gallery rather than a theatre
space. Its creators insist that it is a 'theatrical' installation, on
the grounds that it was inspired by a Beckett play and due to the
underlying idea that the 'theatre' here should happen in your
imagination and your lungs. This could indeed be true of an audience
member like me, who might be trying to give up smoking, but even in
such a case, the dramatic effect is fleeting. Instead, while witnessing
this installation, I spent the entire thirty five minutes longing for
human presence on this luminous 'stage', and frankly, I do not think
that feeling lonely and disorientated is worth the ticket price, or
that it is in any way the point of a theatre experience, however
mind-altering, relaxing or pretty the entire experience might be. Duska
Radosavljevic

Bruised Blueberries The Zoo - Rosalind Ashe's
self-written solo piece is a portrait of the vicar's wife from Hell,
the smug and totally un-self-questioning know-it-all who butts into
other people's lives in the guise of helping them and in the process
destroys them. Ashe plays the woman and also some of her victims - the
working class mother trying to cope with her tearaway son, the aging
flower child quite comfortable in her nonconformity, the spinster
caring for her mother, and the like. And she proceeds to do or advise
exactly the things that will get the boy in real trouble, take all the
meaning from the carer's life, etc., in each case happily putting the
blame on the victims. It's a small piece, but the villain is a good
theatrical creation well captured in Ashe's performance. Most of the
others are underwritten, though, and the structure of very short scenes
means that she sometimes spends more time changing costumes than
acting. Gerald Berkowitz

The Bubonic
Play Pleasance - All right, this
might appear to be a parodic take on 14th century England and its mores
- Chaucerian euphemisms and affectation of chastity included - but it
is a comedy so much at the service of its audience that not a tiniest
gag or a quip will be allowed to slip past unnoticed. Wide-eyed and
thoroughly disarming, the threesome punctuate every sentence by
child-like stares into the auditorium thus managing to get away with
just about anything from utter cheesiness to glimpses of genius. Their
story - concerning a love triangle between a lord, his maid and a
travelling minstrel infected by the plague - has one of the most
bizarre endings in the world of comedy (read 'death has come inside me'
in its contemporary mode). However, Piggy Nero and their director Cal
McCrystal cast a whole new light on the notion that 'it is not what you
tell, but how you tell it'. So, what starts out as a parody of medieval
England, journeys through an entire history of folk entertainment,
featuring songs (with trills), jigs, masks and even Punch and Judy,
video and mirror balls - Just sit back and enjoy! Duska
Radosavljevic

Brendan Burns - All My Love, All My RagePleasance Dome
- Brendan
Burns presents himself as an angry comic, but he obviously has so much
fun venting his spleen that the effect is more gleeful than
vituperative. Like last year's show, this one takes its start from the
fact that his girl dumped him - though, as he continues the story in
what he declares to be the second part of a trilogy, he describes the
process of moving beyond rage. After happily telling us what he thinks
of dance club DJs (like the one his girl ran off with), he moves into
what at first seems like an extended digression on the adventures of
being single father of a six-year-old, but the curative power of his
love becomes quickly evident as both material and manner soften. The
girlfriend saga reaches its climax (for this year's show, at least) in
his account of feeding magic mushrooms to a crowd at Glastonbury in
what was meant as a grand ceremony of exorcism. Along the way he has
time for audience interaction and a shaggy dog story, well worth the
wait, on the worst thing he ever said. What in less adept hands could
have been self indulgent - two, perhaps three years on a broken love
affair - is carried by Burns' winning personality, skilful control of
the stage and strong and infectious sense of the ridiculous, not least
his own. Gerald Berkowitz

Cabaret
DecadanseGilded Balloon Teviot - A puppet show with
attitude, this three-performer programme fills the stage with more
colour, music and comedy than most all-human offerings. Using a variety
of puppet styles, from articulated dolls to life-sized extensions of
their own bodies, the trio create a cabaret of delightful
inventiveness. The jolly and seductive compere is played by Andre-Anne
Le Blanc in a Trestle-style head, the feuding divas suggest
two-foot-high versions of Josephine Baker and Britney Spears, a pair of
dancing birds and some muppet monster-like creatures each do a number,
and the finale is given over to a rubber-limbed singer-dancer on human
legs. Each lip-sync performer has a full personality and instant
audience rapport and, with most of the puppets operated by Serge
Deslauriers and Enock Turcotte, no pretense is made that the two
manipulators are invisible. Instead, they move and react in response to
the stars, taking on the amusing roles of backup dancers in a manner
that actually enhances the illusion. Music ranges from camp anthems to
Kander and Ebb, by way of African-flavoured jazz and blues, the variety
of styles and performers adding to the show's freshness and delight. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Caesar
Twins and Friends Assembly Rooms - In a manner
indicating an evening of fun, frolics and flirting, the show opens with
a display of what seem to be sms messages coming in from the audience
members in real time. Even more promisingly, we are asked to keep our
mobiles on for the duration of this show as we embark on an acrobatic
cabaret with the two identical Polish athletes, a leggy power ballad
chanteuse and a saxophone player. Section by section, the show is a
mixture of the beautiful and the bizarre. Pablo and Pierre Caesar and
their friends are all performers of exceptional talent, charisma and
stage-worthiness. On the whole, however, it is crystal clear that the
brain behind their show is quite unashamedly concerned only with
exploiting the commercial potential of the brothers' skills, looks and
their life-story - which does feature some truly harrowing moments. The
result is a cheerful homoerotic extravaganza with bits and bobs for
families with kids and the playstation enthusiasts. It's no surprise
that by the end of it all, the promise from the beginning was all
forgotten about. Duska Radosavljevic

CagePleasance
- A horrifying tale of spousal abuse and its unpredictable effect on a
child is given an intensely and unrelentingly powerful production by
the courageous and inventive Badac Theatre Company . The physical
violence, which is almost uninterrupted, is presented entirely
symbolically, though in a way that is almost as terrible as the real
thing. But the play's real horrors lie in its depiction of the
psychological destruction of all three people involved. An obviously
near-insane husband repeatedly beats his wife, whose only refuge is a
religious faith that assures her God must have some purpose in this
suffering. Hearing this, their daughter tries to will her father back
into the loving Daddy she wants so much to love. But the play's most
shocking insight is that the child's real emotional struggle is to
resist the temptation of contempt for her mother. Writer/director/actor
Steve Lambert stages the piece so that the three actors almost never
relate directly to each other, which makes it even more remarkable that
they not only synchronise their actions but sustain an equally high
level of almost unbearable emotional intensity. Lambert's portrayal of
a man clearly so threatened that he must destroy to feel secure is
matched by Emma Christer's heartbreaking portrait of a soul-destroyed
victim. But it is Saskia Schuck as the child unable to stop what is
happening and horrified by her own emotional responses to it whose
characterisation and torment embody all the play's horrors. Gerald
Berkowitz

Jaik Campbell - I've Stuttered So I'll F-f-finishC Electric - Jaik Campbell's
biggest handicap as a comic is not his stutter, which is actually
hardly noticeable, but his complete lack of funny material, stage
presence, audience control, self-awareness, discipline or delivery.
Prone to mumbling to his shoes rather than addressing the audience, his
thoughts repeatedly trail off into silence, not because he can't speak
them, but because he discovers in mid-sentence that he has nothing to
say. At this show he spotted an old friend in the small audience and
devoted the show almost entirely to reminiscing with him, ignoring
those who had paid for an hour of comedy. It was not until more than
halfway through the hour that he attempted his first joke, a poor one,
thereafter lapsing back into private thoughts inspired by the meeting.
Even if this was an unusual event, a minimal degree of professionalism
would have kept him from being so sidetracked by the reunion or would
have quickly led him back on track . The few bits of comic material
that slipped in did not bode well for less disrupted shows, as the
jokes were all second-hand chestnuts poorly delivered. Some videotaped
sketches, interpolated when he could figure out how to work the remote,
were startlingly and uniformly unfunny. A passing reference to fellow
stutterer Daniel Kitson only served to underline how completely out of
his league Campbell is, and how ill-suited he is for his chosen field
of endeavour. Gerald Berkowitz

Captain Corelli's MandolinValvona and Crolla - Those who know the
work of Mike Maran - and judging by the attendance at this show, he
already has a firm following - will know what to expect. The rest of us
might at first be baffled by the prospect of having one of the most
famous romantic novels performed by two middle-aged men with beer
bellies and two ladies stranded in amongst a whole orchestra of musical
instruments, on a stage the size of a couple of square meters. The
appearances are deceptive however. Maran and Philip Contini have the
stamina and enough storytelling flair that they even fluff and stumble
charmingly - not to mention their operatic singing! Several cardboard
cut-outs help to move the story of Louis de Bernieres' popular novel
along and yield a few laughs - and there are moments which promise to
be a regular tear-jerker time after time, without a fail.
Duska Radosavljevic

Carmen Angel Hill Street - Canadian Joey
Tremblay writes dreamlike plays whose reality you must accept
unquestionably, and Catalyst Theatre specialize in using all the
resources of theatre to make a text come alive. So this solo show,
starring Chris Craddock, draws you so fully into its tale of memory and
obsession that you reach the desired state of unquestioning acceptance,
and the tale being told becomes real. The central figure is haunted by
memories of his childhood in small-town Canada, most of them warm and
cosy, some of them disturbing in a presexual way, because his playmate
in those prepubescent days was a preternaturally beautiful young girl,
one who exuded sex even before either of them knew what it was. And she
met a horrible end, which is a part of the memory the man must
painfully work his way back to before his adult sensibility can
perceive a truth the child couldn't. In what amounts to an
uninterrupted monologue, including the voices of the other characters,
Craddock's sometimes amplified, sometimes echoing voice carries us into
the realm of incomplete and distorted memory for a hypnotic and
breath-taking hour. Gerald Berkowitz

CasinaSweet on the Grassmarket
- Plautus,
done by a community theatre group from Northumberland - obviously way
out of its league in the Fringe setting, and yet neither a disaster nor
an embarrassment. The play is a shortened version of a typical Plautus
comedy (Think of Up Pompey or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum) - a dirty old man wants to bed a young beauty, and plans to
marry her off to his servant as a cover, but his virago wife plans to
use another servant as a beard for her son's love for the
girl. Predictably, while they plot against each other
onstage, the boy and girl run off together offstage. Stuck in a small
hotel room with a stage so tiny they could do nothing but line up in a
row, the Ding Millers players offer little in the way of staging, and
frankly much of the acting is on a level only their friends and
neighbours could love. But Mike Smith captures some of the comic
character of the randy but hen-pecked husband, and has a nice audience
rapport, and the hour is a pleasant one. Gerald Berkowitz

Charity
Begins at HomeBernardo's Charity Shop - To set a play in a
charity shop is an idea full of wonderful possibilities. To perform it
in one is even more exciting. Hard Graft theatre company's realisation
of this idea unfortunately doesn't go very far. Mark Whiteley's script
is light, intentionally humorous but perhaps too slight on the plot
development. Even the conceit is a bit trite and short-sighted, and
follows a lengthy character set up. A struggling and kind hearted shop
keeper Joyce finds loot in a bag that lands on her doorstep, but
despite her penny-pinching husband's great plans on how to spend it,
she is loath to take it home. It never quite becomes apparent what the
advantages of staging the play in a charity shop might be other than
adding some naturalism to otherwise hammy acting. To be fair, actress
Cerianne Roberts has got a lot more range than Nicholas Gallagher, but
although they do get quite a few laughs, both are too young for the
parts. This forces the director to resort to wigs, fake spectacles and
stage make up, which are unfortunately not easily found on the shelves
of your average Bernardo's. Duska Radosavljevic

Christie and Doyle's Axis of Evil Underbelly
- How much comedy can you get out of the subject of evil? Whichever way
you look at it, in a show with such an angle, you'll always come round
to a satirical impersonation of a vile murderer or two. If you're lucky
and particularly good, you might even manage to get away with it.
Bridget Christie and Andrew Doyle take their time before the
controversial finale, offering a series of sketches on domestic
violence, bigotry and a disassociative identity disorder. This is
padded with bits of research in a newsreader tone of voice and
juxtaposed with an absurdist take on trainspotting. Sections of the
material are indeed well penned, quirky and amusing, although I
couldn't shake off the impression of a bias against women. Christie's
dislikeable bully tends to get a bit too much at times, but she
eventually makes up for it with her version of an Irish nun. Still,
it's mostly embarrassed giggles rather than guffaws coming from the
aisles, leading to the conclusion that what Christie and Doyle
desperately need is a really ruthless director. Duska
Radosavljevic

Circus of the FutureGilded Balloon Teviot - It might be merely a
matter of personal taste, but I found this cliche-ridden dig at Eastern
European circus, animal activism and Geordie women particularly
difficult to stomach, especially while having to sit in an oven of a
venue. The concept of Frog Stone and Lydia Aers' show is theoretically
interesting - a time-travelling circus troupe stops off in 2005 with a
foreknowledge of the future and an array of dysfunctional relationships
backstage. In practice, however, the show is a text-book example of the
fact that what might look good on paper may not translate well on the
stage, particularly when the ultimate judge of this is the writer
herself. Talking of which, the intended puns are so dense and
narcissistic that the show should come with an accompanying script for
full appreciation; or the writer should simply turn to publishing. Not
surprisingly, the circus premise above doesn't really go anywhere,
regardless of the initial hints of narrative. And therefore it doesn't
take any special powers to see that this show is more about an ego trip
than genuine entertainment, which hardly makes it worth the roast.
Duska Radosavljevic

Clak!Sweet Ego - The Fringe has
really got something for everybody, including the film buffs. But even
if you happen to have an interest in martial arts, stunt co-ordination
or just good old knockabout comedy, this show by brothers Angel and
Mateo Amieva won't fail to impress. Whizzing their way through an
astonishing range of evocative cinematic references with the minimum of
well chosen props, this talented duo also manage to resurrect
everything that is the best about the stage comedy tradition. Their use
of space, movement, illusion and timing is impeccable and they also
have an interesting (double) take on audience participation. Most
importantly however, they just look like two boys at play - and that?s
what makes the whole thing irresistibly delightful for the audience
too. True, their scene changes could be slicker, and be warned, their
time-keeping is incorrigibly Spanish (overrunning by about ten minutes
the day I saw it). However, with a glorious 'firework display' at the
end and a Moulin Rouge routine that would put Ms Kidman to shame, it's
all worth every milli-second of it. Duska Radosavljevic

Dan Clark - Erotic Neurotic
Pleasance
- Dan Clark confesses he a worried man. He's about to hit the big 3-0
but he's still behaving like a teenager - compared to his father, at
least. He's certainly got oodles of energy and a similar amount of
stand-up material to get a laugh. Aside from worrying about getting
old, he's fascinated by people's names and whether we get the ones we
deserve, and he has an innovative way of getting the audience warmed
up. There's a musical interlude as he accompanies himself on acoustic
guitar. Best of the ditties is a New Wave-ish number where he
propositions a woman in a supermarket aisle. The apology immediately
afterwards for not doing well with the opposite sex goes down well, as
does the checklist of what makes a perfect woman. Clark seems to find
shifting between script and ad-lib awkward and he would be happier in
front of middle-class students. Though this relaxed Edinburgh crowd
gave him belly laughs aplenty, he was too worried about losing the
thread that he barely noticed. All that energy and timing for nothing.
But what seems to really worry Clark is that a particular routine about
midgets and another about gay men may offend public sensibilities. He
should be concerned, however, not about the PC rating of these
laborious items but whether they're actually funny. Nick Awde

A Clockwork
OrangeGilded Balloon Teviot - Anthony Burgess's
classic satire on the breakdown of society - and portrait of Alex, the
anti-hero who thrives on it - gets a high energy facelift courtesy of
New York-based Godlight. It's an ambitious undertaking and all credit
must go to director Joe Tantalo for refusing to kowtow to Stanley
Kubrik's iconic film version. The nine-strong cast, all in black, play
a surreal gallery of characters from street thugs and rape victims to
prying psychologists and cynical ministers, mixed to a strident
soundtrack of metallic beats and uber-composer Beethoven. As Alex, Ken
King focuses the stripped-down action neatly by skilfully switching
between narrator and protagonist, while his picaresque is made all the
more colourful thanks to his droogs played by Jason MacDonald, Mike
Roush and Josh Renfree plus the sinister Dr Deltoid (Greg Kornow). This
is a guaranteed crowd pleaser, one aimed at the legions of fans
worldwide and so Godlight's production is impervious to criticism.
Still, though the story and characters click nicely in parts, most
notably Alex's horrific aversion therapy, most of the meaning has been
sacrificed for style, while the gabbled lines lose all nuances of the
droogs' Anglo-Russian argot. In the process most of the humour has been
shorn - surely a key element in the story's ability to shock - while
none of the socio-political comment survives. Nick Awde

Alun Cochrane - Comedy With Sad Bits
Edinburgh Comedy Room - There are very few
sad bits in Alun Cochrane's genial hour (he admits that he came up with
the title before the routine) with the closest being a riff on the
pathos of going to a movie - a Bridget Jones movie, no less - on your
own. Nor is there much in the way of anger, though he does express his
comic contempt for authors like Dave Peltzer who make a career out of
whining about their terrible childhoods. No, Cochrane is a generally
happy guy - happy to be in this unusual playing space, happy to have
discovered an odd plaque on the wall, even happy to confess to what he
suspects may have been a hint of racism, when he saw a couple of guys
fighting in a Hong Kong street and was disappointed that there was no
kung fu involved. That sort of skewed take on the ordinary is typical,
seen also in his speculations on the effects of Ann Summers on the
Tupperware party industry. So even though many of his anecdotes are
introduced as something one friend or another told him, you suspect
that it is his own cheerful sense of the absurd that is their source. Gerald
Berkowitz

Coelacanth Pleasance - The
coelacanth is a fish that has not evolved in millions of years. It
plays only a tiny role in Ben Moor's story-telling, but lends itself to
a moral about the need to grow and change. Moor's tale is a fantasia
based on an imagined sport of competitive tree-climbing and his
chequered romance with a beautiful climber. From that premise he weaves
an elaborate alternative world, described in language sometimes lush,
sometimes witty, and draws us into it to follow the adventure and reach
the moral. Moor is an excellent storyteller (which is a talent akin to,
but in some ways far more difficult than acting), and his modest and
amused manner does much to carry the hour. Fans of the American
storyteller Garrison Keillor will recognise the genre and performance
style though, as with Keillor, one can't help feeling that most of the
power of the work lies in the writing, and that it would be almost as
much fun to read for yourself as to hear. Gerald Berkowitz

Come Again: The World of Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore Assembly Rooms - [Disclaimer:
this play was written by two friends, TheatreguideLondon reviewer Nick
Awde and Chris Bartlett. I read early versions of the script, saw it in
workshop, and have followed its fortunes from conception to production.
Read what follows in that context.] Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore, two of the groundbreaking Beyond The Fringe foursome, almost
accidentally fell into a double act, through a British TV series, a
stage show and a couple of films, until Moore became a Hollywood star
in the 1980s and Cook's career went into decline. The play shows all
this in flashbacks within the frame of a TV chat show interview, its
dramatic power coming from Moore's gradual awareness, in the retelling,
of the degree to which Cook exploited him professionally and abused him
personally, the understanding that to some degree he collaborated in
his own mistreatment, and the realisation that he has outgrown and
moved beyond his partner. The play is frequently very funny, while also
offering dramatically satisfying insights into the two personalities
and the complex dynamics of their partnership that may even be right.
Under the fluid direction of Izzy Mant, Kevin Bishop goes for a spot-on
impersonation of Dudley, while Scott Handy opts rather for the essence
of Peter's laid-back sneer. Alexander Kirk captures the chat show
host's oily charm, and Fergus Craig and Colin Hoult provide support in
several secondary roles. Gerald Berkowitz

Cossack PassionGeorge Square Theatre - The music is lively,
the costumes are colourful, the men leap and kick, the women are
twirled, and the action is almost unceasing, with hardly a pause for
applause between numbers. Anyone looking for a short programme of
Cossack dance will find exactly what is wanted here. The Russian
Cossack State Dance Company of about thirty dancers and a half-dozen
each of singers and musicians presents a fast-moving well-paced
programme of totally accessible folk dance and music, with only the
occasional hint of a Disneyfied artificiality. A few brief solos apart,
it is very much an ensemble show, with the stage filled with dancers
for almost every number. Attractive indications that they do not take
themselves over-seriously can be found in such touches as the
accordionist with a basket of ever-smaller squeezeboxes and a
delightfully comic dance duet involving an oversized pair of boots.
Even the inevitable Ochi Chornia is subtly sent up as the chestnut it
is. Ballet fans will spot the occasional hint of classical Russian
choreography, serving as a reminder that it was these folk dances that
came first. But the pleasure for most will be in a programme of colour,
movement and melody that delivers what it promises and does not
overstay its welcome. Gerald Berkowitz

CowardsPleasance - Four guys,
identically dressed, do sketches. Though there's no stated theme, these
could be scenes from a sitcom about the same neighbourhood, such are
the shared hang-ups, obsessions and social awkwardnesses on display. A
circle of friends find their own different ways of coping with a mate
who blatantly claims that Tim Henman has just texted asking him to be
his best man, while a novice preparing for ordination as a priest
winces each time the bishop marches into the vestry and adolescently
blanks him. Meanwhile men stuck in trees holler out to each other jokes
they've been thinking up while languishing there, as a party animal
hangs for dear life onto the hands of another man whose ankles, in
turn, are being held by a woman in the cable car above them - it looks
like being a successful rescue until the party animal starts dishing
the dirt on the woman's sex life. It's a tight set, and Tim Key, Stefan
Golaszewski, Tom Basden and Lloyd Thomas make it all seem easy. There
is some impressively observant writing here coupled with a depth of
characterisation - the rapport these guys have with each other is
second to none. And that paradoxically is problematic since most of the
time that synergy works for the general group and one struggles to
remember individual performances or even sketches. It's readily sorted
by separating out their roles and concentrating on the individual
quirks that clearly are already there. The strong script will take care
of the rest. Nick Awde

The Dark RootDemarco Roxy Art House - This Mexican
production, brought to Edinburgh from the Teatro Linea de Sombra under
the Mexart 2005 umbrella, resembles nothing so much as a 1960s-era
'happening' in its not-terribly-original mix of performance, dance and
physical installation in the service of a nonlinear, nonspecific mood.
While a shop mannequin sits in one corner of the stage watching itself
on television, four live performers go through a string of
uncommunicative actions. One woman removes her shirt while another
staggers about. Apples change hands and soup cans are examined under a
magnifying glass. Fear and death are repeatedly mimed. The dominant
features of the set are a large number of hanging weights, which are
occasionally swung like pendulums, and several distorting screens,
through which we occasionally view the performers. The whole is
accompanied by a continuous soundscape of music and mechanical noise,
with the only hint of meaning coming from the early recording of Robert
Oppenheimer's reaction to the first atomic bomb, 'Now I am become
death, destroyer of worlds.' This, with the generally dark tone,
suggests a bleak vision of modern existence. But, aside from
the general opacity, the company's symbolic and performance
vocabularies are limited, giving the impression that they run out of
material within fifteen minutes and merely repeat with minor variations
for the rest of the hour. Gerald Berkowitz

The Dentist Chair Zoo - Either too clumsy
for a close-up magician or too shy for conventional comedy, Wayne
Slater has resorted to a compromise and invented the 'comedy mime
artiste' El Loco. In addition, he has assembled an entire dentist's
surgery full of tricks, traps, sound effects, radio jingles and
gimmicks - the dentist chair with a toilet seat included - and created
a show which is more of an amusement station than a piece of theatre.
Slater obviously relishes in lip-syncing to extracts from pop songs and
radio ads while clowning around with guns, toys and joke-shop
paraphernalia, and his enjoyment seems to rub off on the audience
somewhat. Participation is a key feature of the show, however, and El
Loco will even have an (un)fortunate audience member handcuffed to the
chair of the title, but I can only assure you that no one will be
harmed in the process. Duska Radosavljevic

The Devil's
LarderDebenham's - Grid Iron's latest
site-specific work places Jim Crace's episodic novel among the back
halls and display floors of an Edinburgh department store. The book is
a string of ruminations on the theme of food and its connection to
other human concerns and activities, several of its self-contained
episodes bring acted out in different locations around the building. In
Housewares a failed fondue party evolves into a successful orgy; in
Bedding a frustrated husband offers his wife an aphrodisiac, only to
have her keep its success a secret from him. The most effective scenes
are those with a lightly comic tone, while the more serious episodes,
such as those of the lovesick chambermaid and the grieving widow,
generally register less successfully. Only the baking mother mourning
the fading of family kitchen rituals, and by extension, the loss of
family, has the sad resonance it wants. While the choice of site may
have been generated by the irony of exploring the power of food in a
temple of acquisitiveness, the site-specificness really does not add
much to a work that might have been just as effective in a more
conventional space, and the experience of promenade is purely
illusionary, the audience being strictly regimented throughout. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Diaries of Marjorie Simpson
Roman Eagle Lodge - Not the blue-haired cartoon
character, but the author-performer's mother-in-law, who kept a diary
during the last years of her life as she resisted the encroachments of
cancer. Elaine Pantling presents her as a quiet heroine, who just gets
on with the business of living, and refuses to be bothered by her
illness as much as she is by the neighbours' cat who keeps fouling her
garden. The pathos, and it is inevitable, comes less from the knowledge
that this life-loving woman will die than from the smaller tragedies
all can identify with. She dotes on her adult children, though the
diary entries relentlessly record their selfishness and snubs. She is
amused by the attentions of the widower across the street, but caught
short by sudden rushes of longing for her own dead husband. She comes
to a respectful truce with the cat because it refuses to treat her like
an invalid, and she understands and appreciates the kindness implicit
in the cool professionalism of doctors and nurses. Never more than a
small piece, performed with an amiable lack of polish that is
appropriate, this is quietly moving just because it is wise enough not
to shout. Gerald Berkowitz

Don't Look BackHM General Register House - Dreamthinkspeak's
Victorian-era take on the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an
atmosphere-laden voyage through the underworld. The audience is
dispatched in pairs or trios into the depths of Scotland's register for
births, deaths and marriages, an astonishing building, built around a
circular domed archive whose eery iron-framed levels and tome-lined
secret passages are accessed only by spiral staircases swallowed up in
the shadows. Without giving too much away, projections, mad archivists,
a violinist and a ghostly woman in white create elements of the Greek
myth of Orpheus, a virtuoso lyre-player who is allowed by the gods to
descend into the underworld to lead his dead lover Eurydice back to the
land of the living. As she follows, he is instructed not look back at
her, but he does, and his lover is dragged back to the dead, leaving
Orpheus condemned to a life of desolation. Spooky, suspenseful,
claustrophobic and yet serene, this Hades impels you ever on yet dares
to dare you to look back to see wha - or who - you might have missed.
In fact, audience involvement is far deeper than in many other
promenade performances. Obviously the fact of walking through the
installation makes you a participant, but there is also the interaction
that develops between the members of each group - vital since there is
so much to spot and absorb. Of our trio, for instance, one handily was
able to whisper every episode of the myth as we made our way through
the shadows, while a second found herself correctly working out the
significance of our ever-changing surroundings. As for me, I thought
hard how best to write up this extraordinary experience. Nick
Awde

James Dowdeswell: 7 Gilded Balloon Teviot
- Gawky, geeky and unashamedly middle-class, that's James Dowdeswell
pure and simple. But don't let the image or throw-away delivery fool
you, for under there lurks one of the best minds on the circuit. He has
no axe to grind, no agenda, no shock tactics. Gloriously that frees him
up to take a giant step into ordinary life - mainly his own, pottering
around in the unlikely depths of Tooting, south London. The material
therefore is, well, ordinary: girlfriend, flat, people in the street, a
hilariously rambling tale about the local bum who makes an income by
threatening to tell strangers what happens in the last chapter of the
books they're reading - Dowdeswell one day find that he's moved on to
the local Blockbusters where he does the same to DVD-bearing customers.
As the show's title suggests, there's a strand around the number seven,
namely that a person's life moves in seven-year cycles. Cue the
opportunity to hold his own life up to this yardstick and cue a stream
of more observations on life, the universe and everything. Gentle as
the humour may be, there are belly laughs aplenty as Dowdeswell slips
in a punchline when you least expect it and throws up a mirror on the
reality of our modern lives. Nick Awde

The DrownerRoman Eagle Lodge - A man runs on a
beach, desperate to get to a phone box. He has discovered a woman
washed up by the sea. Perhaps in flashback, the story unravels frame by
frame of how he finds her and takes her home. Is there a Donnie
Darko-like time warp in the man's life or has he dreamed it all? Has
she been saved from Davy Jones' locker only to end up with Rain Man or
is she dreaming it all? Ben Duke gives us a man whose restless, anxious
mind is reflected in his jolty running and gauche yet endearing
mannerisms. Raquel Meseguer's woman is more sophisticated, portrayed
through a more controlled melding of styles as seamless as she
sensuously twists and glides. Entrancing duets leap off a cast-iron
bath or find quiet instrospection in the kiss of life. Commenting on
the action is the husky-voiced Jim de Zoete. Accompanying himself on
acoustic guitar, he creates plaintive ballads from thoughtful pop songs
such as The Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues, the lyrics finding a gently
wry take on the couple's drama. Duke and Meseguer also lend their
voices, unafraid of writing dialogue that is sparse but equally gentle
and wry. Simultaneously raw and slick, Lost Dog have created a work
that hits the mark at every level. Nick Awde

The Drowning PointC venue - A woman whose
husband and best friend died in a boat accident while having an affair
is torn by the conflicting emotions of grief and betrayal in a play
that follows her through the stages in a never-fully successful attempt
at coping and moving on. Nicholas Earls' play is at its best when it
delves into the woman's justifiably confused thoughts and emotions, and
weakest when it gets bogged down in the soap opera bathos of the
adultery. Among its strongest insights are that the impulse to suicide
might be as much a desire to join the lost loved ones as an escape from
pain and that the need to make sense of the affair can keep interfering
with the process of recovery from grief. But even at its best the
script merely sketches in character and psychology that are left for
the performer to flesh out. Claire Porter works hard at the task of
creating a coherent character out of the bits and pieces of psychology
in the script, but it is inevitably a hit-and-miss affair, with some
moments, such as the attempted suicide, more effective both
theatrically and as character insights than others, such as a classroom
lecture that too predictably breaks down into self-exposure. A
continuous background of expressionistic film and sound montages and a
few moments of dance add little. Gerald Berkowitz

Robert Dubac
- The Male Intellect: an Oxymoron?Gilded Balloon Teviot - There are some shows
where you might walk in and understand every word, but in retrospect it
all seems like it was done in a foreign language. In his show, Dubac
explained something about the chromosome differences between men and
women, but I think it was mostly to do with why men don't understand
what women want, rather than why I may not have got the point of his
show. The story goes like this - two weeks ago he was dumped by his
fiancee and she is about to phone and give him the final chance to
understand what she wants. As a result, he is surrounded by self-help
books, a blackboard and a selection of clothes on a coat stand (which
helps him recreate various mentors who have tried to explain women to
him).The hour, in other words, is filled with a mixture of street
wisdom, mumbling into the (unnecessary) microphone and recycled
pop-psychology, for him to eventually solve the magic equation. And all
this with the charisma of a man who has been dumped.Duska
Radosavljevic

The Durham Revue - Battered Wives and Chips Underbelly - Once a staple of the
fringe, the university revue or sketch show has fallen into disrepute,
with only the very uneven annual products from the Oxford and Cambridge
assembly lines continuing to carry the flag. So this student group from
Durham are doubly welcome, for having the courage to try and for
succeeding as well as they do. Their sketches are rarely cutting-edge
in structure or subject, but they are quick and to the point and - and
it is amazing how rare and difficult this is - generally have
punchlines rather than just trailing off. Eve and a reluctant Adam,
Ninjas who fight like girls, a German video rental shop, a cop who lets
a criminal go because he's drinking fair-trade coffee, guys joining
Fathers for Justice just to wear the silly costumes - they're all
modest concepts but all work, making for a happy hour. Gerald
Berkowitz

East
Coast Chicken SupperTraverse
- For the first 20 minutes of Martin J. Taylor's new play, two men ask
a third where's he's been and why he didn't tell them he was going.
That's all, the same question posed over and over, without repetition,
hesitation or digression, and pretty soon the audacity of the device
becomes its own justification, as you delight in how long the
playwright is able to keep the linguistic juggling act going. You can
get high on the language and settle in, expecting the same virtuosity
to continue. And it doesn't. The three, it turns out as the verbal
razzle dazzle fades and a plot begins, are small town Scottish drug
dealers thinking about quitting and moving on, a decision encouraged by
a get-out-of-town warning from the local hard man. One of the three has
ambitions to become a chef, thus the title dinner, cooked before our
eyes and noses during the play, but this, like the question of where
his buddy went and why, is a really irrelevant overlay. One of the
three double-crosses the others and runs off with the profits and then
the play stops - not finishes or ends, just stops, in what seems a
mid-scene. The play's virtues are in that opening sequence and in some
comical local-colour generated by the trio; its failings are in having
nothing to say and ultimately saying it rather poorly. Gerald
Berkowitz

The
Edinburgh Love Tour Pleasance Courtyard - To be
honest I was dreading this - a romantic lovey-dovey tour of Edinburgh's
streets in the middle of a typical Edinburgh August (i.e. cold, rainy
and windy). But I'm so glad I went. Rosemary (Zoe Gardner) and Steven
(Chas Early) are our guides for the trip. They're a chirpy couple and
for good reason. Not only do they know every romantic tale linked to
the souls who inhabited or frequented the houses and bars in the old
town but they also offer their own memories of how and where they met,
courted and married. They revel in awful puns and chat gauchely with us
as we walk, building an intimacy that leads them to relax and to share
more of their private life with us. Sadly we soon realise that this
opening up is also exposing more than a few rifts in their marriage.
The resulting battle threatens to split a relationship in the city
where they first fell in love. To say more would give things away,
although it's only fair to mention Alexander Perkins and Lucy
Carmichael's essential contributions to the tour. Endearing, clever and
darkly, darkly funny, this is pure fringe magic. Nick Awde

Enola Baby Belly - Al Smith's new play
attempts to give graspable meaning to the story of the first atomic
bomb by literally giving it a human face, a girl named Enola Gay,
namesake of the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, whose life
touches tangentially on those of the scientists in the Manhattan
Project that developed the bomb. The connections between the large and
small stories are somewhat strained, as when the moral issues of the
bomb are somehow equated to the local Catholic priest's attitude toward
the suicide of Enola Gay's mother. Acting is poor throughout, and the
piece is certainly not helped by being in the single worst venue in
Edinburgh, an airless cellar in which only the first row of the
audience have any chance of seeing the actors. Still, it does seem to
resonate with some audience members, who enthusiastically respond to
something I was unable to find here. Gerald Berkowitz

Eve and LilithDiverse Attractions - This short play
written by and starring Jessica Martenson and Deborah Klayman is an
ambitious and inventive take on the Lilith legend that suffers a bit
from the almost inevitable first play syndrome of taking on too much
and trying too hard. Transported into the modern world, the
self-indulgent first wife and current mistress Lilith meets the
buttoned-down second wife Eve and, not realising they're both
complaining about the same man, they bond in a way that affects them
both. Lilith drops her mask of debauchee long enough to expose a real
unhappiness, and Eve has her feminist consciousness raised. The play
meanders uncomfortably among the genres and tones of light comedy,
psychological study, allegory, feminist screed and high poetry (with
relevant poems by Michelene Wandor interpolated between scenes),
putting too much of a strain on the actresses to hold it together. But
they succeed better than you might expect, and the piece shows promise
for them, both as writers and performers. Gerald Berkowitz

The Exonerated Queen's Hall
-
The Exonerated of the title are the unfortunate souls who have been
falsely accused of murder and cynically dumped on death row in the face
of evidence entirely to the contrary. Each of the real-life case
studies here ended in a final, successful appeal and release from
prison, yet the years, even decades, in limbo awaiting the electric
chair or lethal injection have already been a death sentence in so many
other ways. Arrayed on stools with scripts on lamp-lit lecterns, ten
company members and guest performers intrepret six victims of the
system and their families, attackers, police officers and court
lawyers. It is a well-oiled ensemble piece thanks to the versatility
and energy of the cast (slightly spoilt by one languidly fidgeting
actress) and director Bob Balaban's tight structure. The agenda driving
the production makes it essential viewing - there's no argument about
that. But dramatically this can never be more than a rehearsed reading
about a subject which, to be frank, has little meaningful resonance for
a non-US audience. Sure we get the idea that the state is rotten in the
States - but we knew that already. But the stories are so parochial,
the lens so white and liberal, that there is little to translate the
true horror of how fragile lives are crushed by America's government
monolith in the name of justice. Nick Awde

Fat, Bald and LoudSweet on the Grassmarket - To which one might
add inventive, versatile and funny. American Craig Ricci Shaynak proves
equally adept at character comedy, observation and improvisation in
this unassuming but winning hour. Appearing first in the guise of a
security guard outside his venue, he puts each audience member through
a separate and equally funny security check. Finally allowed into the
room, we get a half-hour of fresh takes on such familiar subjects as
family life and school embarrassments. The fact that his parents were
both chain smokers gets a running gag of its own, with the poor-me
quality of such reminiscences never tipping over into bathos. For the
last twenty minutes of his act Shaynak brings out the Giant Wheel of
Accents, takes on some improvisation suggestions and delivers them in
the voice the spinning wheel dictates. It's a clever way of
demonstrating his comic versatility and builds to a satisfying climax
when his final improv runs through every accent on the wheel. There's
nothing cutting-edge about Shaynak's material - indeed, an American
comic of fifty years ago could have done virtually the same act. But he
does it well, and he is funny. Gerald Berkowitz

Tim Fitzhigham - In the Bath UnpluggedPleasance - Tim Fitzhigham is
one of my very favourite Strange Persons. He does odd things and then
describes them in very funny ways. Last year he got it in his head to
row the English Channel in a bathtub for charity, and told us all about
it, from practising with the UK Olympic rowing team, to crossing the
path of a supertanker, to not quite making it. Not content to rest on
the laurels of defeat, Tim did the whole thing over again this year,
tacking on a row up the Thames to London, and he actually got there, to
great fanfare, just days before coming to Edinburgh. And here he is
again to report on the adventure, sparing no one from his awareness of
the absurdity of it all - not the Royal Navy, not the French Coast
Guard, and most certainly not himself. If you've seen Tim before, you
know what a great storyteller he is. If not, come and wonder at this
wild-eyed not-so-ancient mariner. Gerald Berkowitz

Fordham & Lipson - He Barks She BitesPleasance - As the publicity
goes, he is golden-voiced, she is rubbery-faced. In fact Philippa
Fordham and Simon Lipson equally sing well and pull rubbery faces in a
well crafted sketch show that hits the audience right where it laughs.
The humour is pleasingly situation-based - rustic hotel-owner and
weekend-breaker, LA plastic surgeon and patient, oncologist and
impressionist - neatly making a strength of out the two-character
scenarios and dropping in punchlines where you least expect them. The
effect is further reinforced by the duo's evident dramatic skills and
rapport. There are some dips along the way but the crowd didn't seem to
notice. The studio techie taking the piss out of a blind singer is
puerile as is the audition for an 'adult whistle dancer' but both got
the loudest laugh. Singing is a regular theme that provides an extra
dimensio - the screeching rendition of House of the Rising Sun that
takes the shine off a pair of first-time lovers - or provides a
platform for the occasional solo spot - Lipson's cabaret singer is a
neat take on being interrupted by the phone at work while Fordham
offers an utterly throw-away but chuckle-inducing studio session singer
at work. Though their standard of writing fluctuates wildly, the
performances are always slick and TV friendly. More importantly,
Fordham and Lipson know their audience, as the peals of laughter
attested. Nick Awde

The Found Man Traverse - The archetypal
Traverse play is a solidly realistic drama steeped in Scottish local
colour and unstrainedly resonating beyond its small story. Though
authors and subjects vary from year to year, the theatre always finds
one to feature at the Festival. This year's entry, Riccardo Galgani's
tale of desperation and xenophobia in a nineteenth-century coastal
village, is not totally successful, but it has some of the evocative
power of the genre. The impoverished village is pinning all its hopes
on a rich man who is moving there and may invigorate the economy. But
first a storm washes up a different near-drowned man, and a string of
errors and panics leads them to kill him. Now the one uninvolved man in
the village is faced with the dilemma of reporting them to the rich man
and perhaps scaring him off, or remaining silent and thus sharing their
guilt. The concept is powerful, and the play falls down only in not
really generating the strong sense of reality on which the genre
depends. Gerald Berkowitz

F***ing Asylum SeekersC electric (reviewed
in London) - An ordinary bloke has his council
flat invaded by a family of new immigrants, who use a combination of
violence and fast talk to take over, reducing him to a servant and
eventually squeezing him out. The message of Victor Sobchak's parable
is spelled out when the victim's girlfriend, having been instantly
seduced by one of the invaders (thereby literalising the play's title),
turns to the audience and states that if the British are too weak and
ineffectual to stand up to the wave of asylum seekers, they deserve to
be dispossessed by them. In a coda, the play changes modes entirely to
imagine a political party of new immigrants seizing power and even
displacing the monarchy. Though there are sufficient touches of humour
in the play for it to be presented as a satire and enough overt
commentary for it to claim merely to be raising a topic for discussion,
the xenophobic stance of Sobchak's play is never in doubt, and is all
the more striking since the author-director is himself an immigrant.
But material that might have made a powerful ten minute satirical
sketch has been stretched far beyond its range, and every passing
minute only diminishes its effectiveness. Gerald Berkowitz

Steve Furst - Behind the Net CurtainsAssembly Rooms
- Deep in suburbia, hidden away behind the net curtains, is where Steve
Furst has sought inspiration for his latest pot-pourri of characters.
They all go down a storm with the Wildman Room audience, most of whom
look as if they've just driven in from the very same surburban bubble
Furst sets out to prick. There's the wideboy who owns 57 properties and
is landlord to anyone who can pay for the privilege. He prefers
negotiating mortgages to selling drugs now, and he gets a bigger high
in any case just by raising the rent. More bizarre creations are the
dour Scotsman who is proud to have a massively overweight wife stuck
upstairs, or the fop complete with smoking jacket describing how his
debts landed him in jail and becoming a hardman behind bars. A
projected sequence of videos introduces each, including a stuntman just
out of years of mental breakdown and a ban on working, who talks to the
camera about how he's getting back in to the business. He's adamant
he's still got what it takes and his increasingly violent
demonstrations of the craft have an impact on his hapless stooge.
Although the show doesn't quite have the flow one expects from Furst's
usual fare, there are laughs aplenty and I suspect everyone will leave
savouring at least one favourite character. Nick Awde

Gaugleprixtown Theatre
Workshop - In
Andrew Muir's new play two men (brothers?) who have not seen each other
since childhood are sitting in a rowboat, ostensibly fishing, but
evidently there to deal with a long-buried secret. When they speak of
it as an unfortunate impulse and then mysteriously catch on their lines
a little girl's shoe and backpack, you probably can guess what it is
that haunts them. But haunt turns out to be the operative word as a
grown woman in a bridal gown suddenly climbs into their boat, the ghost
of one who never lived to become a bride. Muir is admirably looking for
a fresh symbolic vocabulary with which to deal with the subject of
guilt and retribution, but he hasn't really found it. The first half of
the play, in which he must perforce keep things secret, meanders
shapelessly; the second half, with the arrival of the woman, is
considerably more energised but has little to tell us that we wouldn't
have guessed long ago. Oh, and the title is a total red herring,
referring to one of the boys' childhood games. Director and actors of
the Menagerie Theatre can do little to make the play come alive. Gerald
Berkowitz

Rhod Gilbert's 1984Pleasance - Dour and grim-faced,
Rhod Gilbert promises an hour of misery and not comedy as he documents
1984, a terrible year of mishaps and disasters that he and his
relatives suffered in Llanbobl, somewhere in Wales. The people, village
and, just possibly, events may be fictional but the laughs are for
real. If some people are born under an unlucky star, then the Gilbert
family were born under an entire galaxy of them. Pausing first to
deliver a surprisingly informative exposition of George Orwell's novel,
Gilbert proceeds to document his own 1984 as a strange schoolboy in an
even stranger family. Like A Hundred Years of Solitude meets Flann
O'Brien meets The Grimleys, these are surreal images. In between the
fiercely funny deaths, amputations and an exploding pancreas, there are
quietly insane depictions of domestic working-class life - since they
had no television, at Christmas his dad would do the Queen's Speech
armed only with a sofa's edge, his index finger and a second-class
stamp. A shoe-box with 'Buckeroo' felt-tipped on the side makes a handy
birthday present. Then there's the brother proud of his skill at
'reverse origami', the uncle who lures kids to his room to play Twister
at every opportunity, and a gory football match to end all football
matches. It's a solid format that is reassuringly familiar, and that's
not a criticism since it simply frees Gilbert up to go where no
shaggy-dog tale has ventured before. Nick Awde

The Gigli
Concert Assembly Rooms - Tom Murphy's drama
won awards in Dublin in 1983, but this production can find little in it
to hold one's empathy, attention or even belief. A young charlatan
running a failed Scientology-like operation gets his first customer in
years, a businessman having a midlife crisis and yearning to sing like
the tenor Gigli. Improbably, he signs up for a series of counselling
sessions, more improbably the two men hit it off and begin exchanging
confessions and self-exposures. Somewhere in there is a girl, a
compulsively adulterous housewife who has chosen the young guy as her
current flame for an improbable reason and leaves him for another
improbable reason. Eventually one of the men goes off happily and the
other kills himself, and we're even cheated of the singing - when it
comes, it's a particularly bad piece of lip-syncing. I simply did not
believe a minute of this show. One of the first lessons in Introductory
Playwriting is that you must have a clear and believable reason why
these people are in this room and why they stay in this room, and this
play simply does not provide that. Gerald Berkowitz

The Girls of the Three and a Half FloppiesTraverse - When British
theatres do foreign plays - a phenomenon on the increase - they do them
at a carefully pitched level of cultural and linguistic translation.
This usually involves extended multicultural workshopping with a
British cast and a famous writer who will take the credit for a
'translation' from a language they do not speak. Well, here is an
interesting variation. Part of an Anglo-Mexican collaboration, this new
play comes with a refreshing degree of authenticity. It is performed by
its original cast - agile, moderately temperamental and with husky
Spanish voices - directed by John Tiffany. The surtitles however have
been written by Mark Ravenhill. It is a puzzling one, not least because
the play itself seems to be a strange concoction of soap-like
naturalism, 'in-yer-face' scene changes and a theatre of the absurd
ending. Add to this Ravenhill's arsenal of expletives - which by
comparison to the original's recognisably narrow range inevitably draws
attention to itself - and you get to read volumes about some intriguing
invisible characters called The Loser and Cuntface. I have loved the
movies recently coming from South America even if they had less
literary surtitles, but this particular play has left me culturally
lost and unenlightened. Duska Radosavljevic

The Glorious and Bloodthirsty Billy the KidGilded Balloon Teviot - A rootin' tootin'
wild west show is the fictional context for a thoroughly mythologised
account of the rise and fall of one of the Wild West's more colourful
figures, as the New Mexico based Trick Lock Company combines narrative,
music, commedia-style farce, acrobatics, circus clowning and even
Brechtian alienation in 75 minutes of high-energy company-developed
performance that only occasionally strains a bit too hard to be jolly.
There's no historical revisionism here - the myth of the New York City
lad who became one of the West's most prolific serial killers without
losing his charm and essential innocence is fully celebrated, the
yee-haws and how-about-thats happily brushing over any moral questions
in the preference for legend over fact. Indeed, the few times that the
high-energy action pauses, as when the narrators muse on the burdens of
fame or Billy's victims speak from beyond the grave on the complex
nature of death, seem to come out of a different, more thoughtful play
than the romp this one is determined to be. With the cast playing
nineteenth-century folk entertainers playing various roles in Billy's
story, no one stands out, and it is the ensemble sustaining of the tone
and energy level that carries the hour. Gerald Berkowitz

Golden ProspectsC Venue - My last show of
the 2005 Festival (If anyone's counting, this is my 100th review) is
this engaging piece of brainless entertainment. To the tunes of cheers
for the hero and hisses for the villain, Skullduggery Theatre hit
exactly the right note with Colin Campbell's high-spirited mock
19th-century melodrama. A naive midwestern family move to California in
1901 in search of happiness, only to meet one comic disaster after
another. Father is cheated in a land deal and dies; mother undergoes an
extraordinary string of limb-amputating mishaps, son and daughter are
separated only to meet unknowingly years later in a brothel, one
villain strikes oil on the land that is rightfully theirs while another
lusts after the girl - you get the idea. No cliche is left unturned,
and no opportunity for the broadest of ham acting is missed. This sort
of thing could go dreadfully wring, but director Ryan Weir clearly
loves and respects the genre he's sending up, and so it works
beautifully, with everyone in the cast giving their all. Special
mention must go to Clive Greenwood, doubling our oleaginous
host-narrator with several supporting roles, and Joe Campling and
especially Matthew Rowland-Roberts as despicably delightful
father-and-son baddies.Gerald Berkowitz

GreedyUnderbelly
- The easy part of writing a revue is coming up with sketch ideas. The
hard part is turning them into actual sketches. Too many of the ideas
in this disappointing show never got beyond the wouldn't-it-be-funny-if
stage. Wouldn't it be funny if some dinosaurs were playing
hide-and-seek? Well, no - when you put it onstage, there's no joke
there. Wouldn't it be funny if a performance poet wrote lousy poems?
Not unless you find a funny way to do it. Wouldn't it be funny if a
doctor made his aged patients race in their zimmer frames? No. How
about a meeting of superheroes with no real powers? But where exactly
is the joke? Wouldn't it be funny if a Russian internet bride
complained about the British bloke who imported her? Yes, actually, but
only because the sketch is really built on an entirely irrelevant joke
that works. Similarly, the generating idea in a red Indian sketch goes
nowhere, though incidental gags like their names (Dances With Anyone)
raise legitimate laughs. But until this company realise that a sketch
needs an end as well as a beginning, and preferably something funny in
between, they will continue to deliver less than they promise. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Grey Automobile Demarco
Roxy Art House
- Take one silent film (in black and white, naturally), add one
honky-tonk pianist, then throw three voice-over artists into the mix.
Made in 1919, El Automovil Gris tells the story of the law enforcement
officials who track down an armed gang that has been terrorising the
good citizens of Mexico City. Dubbing in Japanese, Irene Akiko Iida
provides a link with the show's inspiration: the benshi, a narrator who
interpreted and voiced silent-screen actors. When subtitles in English
materialise onscreen, she switches to Spanish. Meanwhile Fabrina
Melon's dazzling virtuosity of voices and sound effects in English and
Spanish puts her right up there with The Simpsons. Claudio Valdes Kuri
gives an radio announcer-style bio of the film, but gabbles to the
point that you cannot tell what language he's speaking. Midway, the
projection is halted for an impromptu entre-acte in which the actors
show they can move as well as speak. The spectacle of a tap-dancing
geisha girl is worth the ticket alone. As the second part of the film
resumes, surreal anarchy takes over and soon they're all singing
boogiewoogie blues with opera, swapping scenarios and even the
subtitles join in. On the piano, Ernesto Gomez Santana is a supremely
gifted musician whose feel for the era is unquestionable. His
whistle-stop tour of musical styles coupled with enviable stamina are
essential to the show. What also helps things gel is that the film is
no mere kitsch bargain-bin B-movie but a world classic that is
perfectly crafted and frighteningly modern in its depiction of criminal
violence. A unqiue experience that is provocative as it is
entertaining. Nick Awde

Guided Tour McEwen Hall - Peter Reder's
site-specific work questions the historicist assumption that facts and
artifacts are superior to memory and emotional association. An
authoritative-sounding man shows us some old photos and bits of pottery
and tells us they are significant, but does that make them so? They may
not even be what he says they are. When, more personally, he shows us
some family snapshots, does their emotional meaning for him give them
authenticity even though they may in fact not be of his family? A film
crew seeks out an old building for an authentic location but then
alters it because it doesn't look old enough. If the changes remain,
will they become part of its reality? The main problem with Reder's
presentation is that I just said all that more clearly, probably more
entertainingly and possibly even more evocatively than he does in his
rambling, underfocused lecture-cum-performance piece. Soft-spoken to
the point of near-inaudibility, meandering around the edges of his
subject without addressing it head-on, and portentously promising more
than he delivers, Reder sometimes seems like a parody of a bad
performer. The piece isn't even particularly site-specific. He has
performed essentially the same show elsewhere and, although we are led
through a couple of rooms of this Edinburgh University building, he has
little to say about it. Gerald Berkowitz

Half SisterCafe Royal - Given a growing
deluge of new writing programmes, classes, sessions, seasons in so many
theatres nowadays, it is interesting that a young writer should decide
to take her first play out into the big wide world single-handedly.
True, Laura Swain has persuaded Holly Harbour to produce and appear in
the play alongside her. However, the absence of the outside eye is
evident within minutes of the lights going up. Or not quite going up
enough, as the case might be. The two are competent actresses and the
play itself - although thin in some respects - is quite compelling.
Concerning half-sisters from distinct class backgrounds being brought
together by the death of their father, the plot revolves mainly around
exercises in status. Naturally, Swain's bias is in favour of her own
character - the illegitimate underprivileged daughter Gill - a smarter
and more profound offspring of the late travel writer with delicate
taste. I would have been interested in a version with a less
predictable premise, for example. But more importantly, I would have
been interested in a production that was a result of more of a shared
team effort. Duska Radosavljevic

Hansel & GretelC too - Over the last few
years, Kipper Tie company have made a small but significant
contribution to children's theatre by dedicating themselves to treating
their audience with respect and dignity. By consciously avoiding the
dramatic and musical genres stereotypically recognisable as
'children's' or 'suitable for children', they bravely resolved to bring
jazz, gospel and rock'n'roll to the nursery rhyme. Equally, in choosing
their stories they have gone for plausible dramas that happen in the
world of children and handled them with immense sensitivity and a great
sense of humour. This time round they have made a curious choice.
Having ransacked Brothers Grimm, they have taken a selection of
familiar characters, placed them into the Hansel and Gretel story and
translated the whole lot into the world of Heat magazine. To an extent.
This is still children's theatre of the Kipper Tie variety - their main
objective being to say that evil stepmothers are not always evil just
as Little Red Riding Hood is not all that good and that the Big Bad
Wolf can be bad for no reason at all and still charm your socks off.
But while their work to date has been the children's equivalent of
Panorama, this one is more of an equivalent of Hollyoaks. Duska
Radosavljevic

The Happy Gang's Jock'n'RollPleasance - The kilts are out
for The Happy Gang's latest show - this time it's a non-stop musical
romp. Admittedly there's less plot than in previous shows, but that
just means that there's more music and songs than ever, much to the
delight of everyone in the audience. Nicky, Spatz and Mr P bounce
onstage and sing how 'you cannae shove your grannie off a bus' and how
they can play the 'piano, piano'. Two intrepid young volunteers are
invited onstage to grab things from 'Granny's broth'. A trip into the
countryside is the cue for the Bear Hunt song. Of course the big bear
is behind them but Nicky, Spatz and Mr P seem not to hear the warnings
from the audience. But this turns out to be a Funky Bear who wants
everyone to know the latest dance craze to do in the upcoming ceilidh.
The resulting routine immediately gets everyone onto their feet and, as
always with The Happy Gang, there's dancing in the aisles. Infectiously
energetic, Nicola Auld, Allan Dunn and Alan Penman sing and joke their
way through one of the most fun-filled productions in town.
Nick Awde

Miranda
Hart's House PartyPleasance Courtyard - Miranda
Hart's new to town and is having a party to help her meet new friends.
Miranda's terribly upper-middle class, enthusiastic with it, simply
bursting with energy and willing us all to have a good time. She's got
the party planner and timetable, assuring us there's something for
everyone as she proudly points out the bowl of Es betweeen the Tennents
and After Eights. Of course the Quality Street is much in evidence
('you know you love the big purple ones, madam') and while the rest of
the audience play pass the parcel, Miranda elicits some delciously
insane contributions from the front row as she recollects her posh nob
set - all farting, belching, racist rightwingers who take every pain to
avoid social faux-pas yet gleefully commit every un-PC trick in the
book. Miranda periodically disappears as her nice but dim public-school
cousin (cruelly, funnily played by Neil Edmond) emerges from the
kitchen with his latest disgusting crisp dip when suddenly the doorbell
announces a succession of guests including horsey friend Poo, the
disturbing couple from the rare breed centre, the bloke she always
fancied at uni, the girlfriend overflowing with proud tales of the
fiancee who still hasn't married her after a decade. All of them look
suspiciously like Miranda. And so the comedy turns to a far deeper
level as we realise that what's really unveiling itself before us is a
portrait of loneliness. Like Joyce Grenfell, Hart walks such a
knife-edge between comedy and drama that at times you don't know
whether to laugh or cry. But laugh all the way through the audience
does. I've rarely witnessed such a brilliantly pulled-off piece as
this, one that touches every soul in the audience (and manages to get
most of them onstage by the end). Nick Awde

Heart of a DogAssembly Rooms -
Mikhail Bulgakov's fable of the interspecies organ transplant gone
wrong is given a topical and political overlay by Rogue State Theatre,
who set it in Zimbabwe, where the attempt to rejuvenate the sex life of
a man results instead in giving his personality to the gonad-donator.
The dog who takes on human personality gets caught up in the ongoing
racial and class warfare, treated by the right with a thinly-disguised
metaphor of racism, adopted by the left as a comrade and commissar, and
discovering for himself the pleasures and perquisites that come with
first-class citizenship. As witty and inventive as the adaptation is,
incorporating mime, dance and puppetry with the acting, and
interpolating lines like 'Some citizens are more indigenous than
others,' its overreaching ambition threatens to overwhelm the political
content. Satire swings so widely that the play's point of view is
muddied, and its edge is further dulled by wasting satirical energy on
irrelevant targets, as the creature speaks and thinks in advertising
slogans and there are gratuitous joking references to Robocop, The
Blair Witch Project and The Pink Panther, while the staging is so badly
adapted to the playing space that sets are repeatedly placed where they
will best block the audience view. Gerald Berkowitz

Hell and High WaterUnderbelly -
Famously, the worst play the Royal Shakespeare Company ever did was one
about the eighteenth-century woman pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. If
only they had done this one instead, that company might have amounted
to something. Mix together Trestle, Rejects Revenge, a Christmas panto
and a bit of Punch and Judy, and you get Blue Chicken. A fast-moving,
gag-filled comic romp built on multiple doubling and quick changes is
made even more delightful by the use of colourful and character-rich
pop-eyed masks, with a cheer-the-hero-hiss-the-villain quality for kids
of all ages and a plethora of puns and double entendres (Anyone for a
Jolly Roger?) for their more debauched elders. Kathryn Nutbeem and
Bethan Tomlinson play the two adventure-seekers who go to sea and
become successful pirates through the lucky coincidence of nobody
noticing that they are (a) the only ones wearing their own faces and
(b) girls. Russell Dean and Woody Murray play everyone else as being in
a pretty constant state of confusion. The jokes come so thick and fast
that even the occasional dud is funny. And there's a singing rat. Eat
your heart out, RSC. Gerald Berkowitz

Here Hill Street Theatre - Michael Frayne's
romantic comedy is built on a single joke repeated in so many
variations that it becomes a bittersweet commentary on the
complications of loving communication. A young couple are so eager to
love and respect each other that neither is prepared to make or stick
to any decision, for fear of the other going along just to be
agreeable. From choosing a place to live (Do you like it? Do YOU like
it?), through furnishing it and establishing living rhythms, to
eventually moving out, they repeatedly talk themselves into
near-paralysis over every issue large or small. And only the fact that
they do love each other, and repeatedly rediscover that just in time,
keeps them going. This nice little production captures all the play's
charm without ever convincing you that it's anything more than a
trifle. James McNeill perhaps makes the boy a bit too argumentative,
forcing Tanya Page to play the girl as the voice of reason, while
Heather Kemble does what she can with a landlady who is too obviously
just an author's device to interrupt the circular conversations from
time to time. Gerald Berkowitz

Hitting Funny Assembly
Rooms
- The audience enters to find a stand-up comic warming up. As he goes
into his act, a fairly standard repertoire of comments on sex, life and
more sex, you might begin to notice that his intensity and anger are
out of proportion to his material. Philip Ralph's self-written solo
piece is in fact a portrait of a man torn by conflicting impulses. He
needs desperately to make people laugh, but he also wants to say
something, to have some effect on the world, and the more he tries to
move his act in either direction, the less he seems able to do the
other. Breaking with his sex jokes, he attempts a mock history of the
art form, imagining both Jesus and Hitler as stand-ups. Reaching for
the serious mode that eludes him, he invokes the spirits of Lenny Bruce
and Bill Hicks. Finally he is forced to recognise that most people's
lives are lousy enough that they don't want meaningful comedy, but just
want to laugh mindlessly, so that - at least until the cultural climate
changes - he is doomed to failure. It's a strong piece, though
sometimes not as linear or clear as my summary suggests, and I suspect
that many in the audience will go away remembering the incidental jokes
and missing the point. Gerald Berkowitz

Hook Line and SinkerC Venue - Two somewhat estranged
half-brothers go on a fishing trip in hope of coming closer together.
But their small talk on a variety of topics including fishing merely
demonstrates the wide gap in their personalities and values, while
memories of their childhood resurrect long-held grudges and pains that
show how what now seems an unbridgeable distance developed. The
reminder that even trivialities from the past can continue to carry
emotional weight, shape personality and control behaviour is a valid
dramatic insight, as is the demonstration that good will alone is not
enough to overcome such emotional baggage. But any playwright
attempting to show that lives are built on and illuminated by small and
undramatic moments runs the risk of creating a play that seems small
and undramatic, and Mike Woodhead does not fully escape that danger, as
his characters and their slight epiphanies carry little emotional
weight. Woodhead himself plays the more intense of the brothers to
Scott Bradley's seemingly less feeling counterpart, but both actors are
limited by a script that barely sketches in characterisations they must
work hard to flesh out. Gerald Berkowitz

Emma Horton - Somebody Shut Her Up
Underbelly
- Luckily for us, rather than aspiring to be some sort of an archetypal
summary of womanhood, this is just a typical Fringe one-woman showcase
(written by a man, Peter Tennant). In a series of monologues and
related songs, Emma Horton explores four very different women including
a debutante actress, a doomed queen, a pop-star wannabe and a daytime
TV priestess. To fit the comedy bracket, these are caricatures rather
than full blown character studies, and somebody seems to have told
Horton that offending people is funny. Truth be told, it's all quite
harmless stuff, ranging from a parody of theatrical narcissism to a dig
at American tactlessness. But being in pursuit of fame herself, this
talented new performer should be worried about other things. Why do
accents if that is not her particular strength, or on the other hand,
why not do a more deliberate singing display if the latter is? Most
importantly however, if Miss Horton sees herself as the next Catherine
Tate, she should learn to write her own material, and if she prefers a
career in theatre, she should stick to the plays. Duska
Radosavljevic

How to Build
a Time Machine Pleasance - A stand-up about
physics sounds like a great idea. At the Edinburgh Festival it's even
more exciting - the kids who grew up on Dr Bunhead's show will very
naturally slot into this one, while those who are desperate to flex
their brain-cells, or just desperately hungover and in need of proof of
their higher faculties, may indulge in some audience participation
featuring questions such as what is G and what is Pi? Surprisingly
however, Dr Patrick Beer (Greg McLaren) is neither a Perrier wannabe
with a Cambridge degree nor an ex-Blue Peter presenter carving a niche.
His lecture presentation may be mind-bogglingly enthralling, but if you
lose him half way through in a black hole of his own material, don't
worry, you're meant to. Because after all, this is only theatre, and
you'll have to remember to follow the subplot (if you get a chance).
But then again, if you see this on tour in the comfort of your own
theatre, you may rest assured that you'll leave the show entertained,
enlightened and moved. Which might just be saying something about the
space-time continuum. Duska Radosavljevic

I Am Star Trek Pleasance
Dome(reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - Rick Vordran's short
play is a biography, salute and expose of the man behind Star Trek,
Gene Roddenberry, but I fear that all but the most fanatic trekkies
(and is there any other kind?) will find it delivering a lot less than
it promises. The play traces Roddenberry's career, from the first pitch
of the Star Trek idea to Lucille Ball's company, through the three
years of the original series and the subsequent dark years during which
Roddenberry (and many of the actors) lived by whoring themselves to
trekkie conventions, to the first way-over-budget film and
Roddenberry's subsequent banishment (though they kept his name on
everything), to his being summoned back to run the Next Generation
series. Along the way, we get some quick behind-the-scenes glimpses of
his loyalty to colleagues and later betrayal of them, of coping with
the prima donna antics of Nimoy and Shatner, of hints of sexual
hanky-panky and of the cold-bloodedness of Hollywood and TV executives.
But there's really little news to any of this, and the natural audience
for this show surely knows all this gossip and more. It's not much of a
play, either, with no real characterisations or character growth, and
nothing but chronology to drive it forward. A hard-working cast double
and quadruple roles as they race through history, but capture neither
good impersonations nor dramatically interesting essences of any of the
characters. Gerald Berkowitz

IdolUnderbelly
- This
short two-humans-and-a-puppet play is advertised as a satire on
ambition, but that theme seems to have gotten lost in rehearsals, along
with any continuity or coherence of plot or character. A
psychiatrist-cum-ventriloquist who relates to others mainly through his
camel dummy meets a hairdresser with dreams of being a singer. Somehow
she is diagnosed as critically disassociated from reality, and
subjected to a regimen of actually supporting her fantasy in order to
make its demolition more traumatic and lasting. But the girl, played by
author Sinead Beary, doesn't seem particularly lost in fantasy, we
never actually see the doctor's methodology at work, the involvement of
a sinister drug company is never really explained, and when, in the
end, the girl suddenly gets involved with a religious cult, its
relevance, and whether this is supposed to be a happy ending or not, is
as unclear as the rest. The camel is entertaining, in a conventional
wise-cracking dummy way, though actor Fergus J. Walsh is a better
puppeteer than ventriloquist, constantly having to turn his back to the
audience to cover his moving lips. To compound their difficulties, both
actors speak too quickly and loudly for the echo-plagued room, making
whole chunks of their dialogue unintelligible. Gerald
Berkowitz

Immaculate Gilded Balloon Teviot - As the name of his
company suggests, Oliver Lansley of Les Enfants Terribles has actually
found that winning formula of talent, charm and absolute irreverence -
think, really cool top of the class kid. As a result, for the fourth
year running, he has a hit show and the audiences doubled with laughter
at a drop of a hat, or a skull mask, as the case might be. In a strange
fusion parodying Berkoffian Greek tragedy and dramatising the
twenty-somethings' attitudes to parenting, his latest piece is about a
modern day Virgin Mary (a single student of marine biology with a
secondary career as a mistress) who finds herself a victim of
immaculate conception and besieged by Angel Gabriel, ex-boyfriend and
Lucifer. Lansley's writing is pacey and clever, innately and ever so
subtly reminiscent of Coward, yet more overtly aspiring towards the TV
canon. The show is graced by almost immaculate performances too, but my
feeling is that if this enfant terrible intends to get anywhere, he
should start thinking of what he wants to be when he grows up. Duska
Radosavljevic

Impromptus Edinburgh
Playhouse
- Progressively denuded dancers rocking and flying, bathing or skipping
around in water-filled Wellingtons, on a set which is a ship or a
shipwreck, a lake and a forest - it can only be Waltz, but not as you
know it. Not the Strauss variety, Sasha Waltz's choreography is more
evidently traceable back to her architect and art connoisseur parents.
Ever since 1993, when she founded her company, and particularly since
her last memorable visit to Edinburgh with Korper in 2000, Waltz has
steadily continued to re-enforce her reputation as one of the visually
most exciting choreographers in Europe. On this occasion, she has
temporarily laid aside her robust epic canvasses and decided to focus
on a series of lyrical impromptus and songs composed by Schubert in
1827. With striking red hair and dressed in virginal white, not even
the mezzo-soprano who only sings four songs half-way through has
escaped Waltz's vigilant eye. Together with the seven dancers wrapped
in Hessian dresses, natural materials and earthy colours dotted with
sparse flowers, the gathering is reminiscent of nymphs at a cocktail
party. There is an endless clay-like malleability, quirky elegance and
a sense of balance-seeking throughout the 70 minutes of music and
silence permutating with stillness and movement. However, the piece as
a whole comes across as a really intriguing sketchbook of ideas, rather
than a completed masterpiece. Duska Radosavljevic

In Limbo Pleasance
- An interesting moment in this piece has three actors on chairs with
their backs to the audience instantaneously transported from a church
funeral into a family car, through the use of a single swift gesture.
Even if this kind of a shift of perspective is usually associated with
the screen rather than the stage, it also functions as a reminder of
the fact that theatre as a genre essentially functions by appealing to
the audience's imagination. Utilising a Brechtian variety of doubling,
role-swapping and choral representation of individual characters, the
Classworks theatre company certainly leaves a lot to the imagination.
Interestingly, however, in adapting David Almond's
semi-autobiographical parable on the horrors of the rite of passage,
they choose to place a very concrete representation of one of the
writer's demons right in the spotlight. Graced by a highly competent
cast, this is a worthwhile and ambitious page to stage exercise, but
while Almond's Potteresque story is undeniably compelling, the actual
reasons behind this particular adaptation never see the light of the
stage. Duska Radosavljevic

The IntruderHill Street Theatre - Maurice Maeterlinck
was one of several dramatists who searched for alternatives to realism
a century ago, and The Intruder uses a mix of non-naturalistic acting
and several unexpected staging and production devices in the service of
establishing a mood rather than merely telling a story. The result is
almost inevitably difficult and unsatisfying for audiences raised on
realism, but the young Kudos company go further than you might imagine
toward making the experiment work. A family are gathered in a house in
which a new mother and her child are both near death. Husband,
children, sister and blind father express their anxieties in ways that
play, by modern standards, as overacting. Periodically the stage goes
dark, and sounds are heard or movement felt in the audience. All sorts
of questions you might expect answered in a play are ignored, all sorts
of loose ends are introduced just to be left dangling. And that's the
point. The intruder - death, perhaps, or just fear and uncertainty - is
among us. Clearly not for all tastes, the piece is a fascinating
experience for students of theatre or just those open to unconventional
theatrical experiences. Gerald Berkowitz

Paul Kerensa's 26 Underbelly
- The '26' in the title of Paul Kerensa's show refers to his age. He
figures he hasn't achieved much to date, so he knocks off two years and
views his life instead through the lens of the TV series 24 and its
star Jack Bauer, who manages to pack more into one day than the rest of
us do in a lifetime. In fact you don't have to know much about super
agent Jack and his antics, but it might help to have some knowledge
about British TV programmes. Kerensa uses 24's hi-tech structure and
gimmicks to navigate his way through the show ('we're gonna do it in
real time') but uses any excuse to go off on a tangent - a bit of
family history (Cornwall), hauling the front row up to examine the Da
Vinci code. When Kerensa returns to the 24 theme it occasionally gets a
little silly - the phone calls from the queen, for instance,
instructing him to go on missions are pointless and yet go down well
with the audience. The humour is deceptively gentle as Kerensa steadily
builds up a comic wave of observations that just keeps on going. He
also makes you think - there's a quite incisive examination of our
prejudices towards gingers (Kerensa's one). As effortless a writer as
he is a performer. Nick Awde

Kiki & Herb
Pleasance
- This was one of those nights when Kiki & Herb were not quite
the glamorously wasted showbiz duo who have earned acclaim both sides
of the Atlantic. The insanely lousy PA pumped a wall of deafening
brittle sound into the hall, ruining its usually excellent acoustics
and stripping any subtlety from the husky vocal cords of drag chanteuse
Kiki or the rippling fingers of pianist Herb. Still, something of a
show was salvageable. Kiki's extended patter about how she and Herb met
at a home for unwanted children during the 1930s goes down a treat -
all the jokes about starting a life as 'gay, retarded and Jewish' - but
the off the cuff quips and catty asides get swallowed up in the sound
system while all that in your face New York energy loses its focus. The
duo's trademark take on mixing and matching pop classics tended to
overcome the technical problems best in the quieter numbers - a simply
manic version of Space Oddity goes down very nicely, thank you. The
crowd-pleaser is Total Eclipse of the Heart - although, to be honest,
there's not much that Kiki's wonderfully louche interpretation can add
to a song already dripping with high camp. Nick Awde

Kurt Weill -
The Broadway YearsEdinburgh Academy - Composer Kurt Weill
had two separate careers and styles - the deliberately hard-edged and
discordant music he wrote in Germany, as for Brecht's Threepenny Opera,
and a softer, more commercial sound he created for a string of Broadway
musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. This modest programme focusses on the
later material, featuring such standards as September Song, Speak Low
and Lost In The Stars along with lesser-known numbers. Even the Weill
fan is likely to make some discoveries - for me they were Life Love
Laughter and Here I'll Stay, from a couple of his less successful
shows. And it is nice to get a sense of the continuity of this Weill
sound, with phrases from his first Broadway show re-echoing in his
last. The quartet of singers, local Edinburgh favourites, serve the
music without getting in its way, making for an unspectacular but
pleasant evening. Gerald Berkowitz

Laurel and Laurel Assembly
Rooms
- Bob Kingdom is a fringe veteran who virtually created what has become
a fringe staple, the impersonation-monologue in the voice of a famous
person. But his current show, about Stan Laurel, is a major
disappointment. Rather than follow the standard format of having the
character address us in a reminiscence, Kingdom invents a debate
between the black-and-white Stan, the amiable fool of the movies, and
the living colour Stan, the man who actually wrote and directed most of
the films, and who lived on after Ollie's death in genteel poverty. The
device is clumsy to begin with, and Kingdom can't pull it off,
frequently getting the two voices confused or forgetting his lines and
looping around or needing prompting. What he wanted to tell us about
Laurel - that he was an unappreciated genius and the film persona
expressed a childlike innocence the real man had lost - is a cliche to
begin with, and all but lost in Kingdom's badly inadequate performance.
In any other context than Edinburgh, where shows are committed to full
festival runs, this one would have closed on opening night. Gerald
Berkowitz

David Leddy's Through the NightTheatre Gateway - David Leddy blends a
rumination on the power of cheap music to comfort and move us with a
modern fairy tale in which a nice person gets her just reward, in a
solo piece that daringly skirts the borders of self-indulgence without
falling over. At its centre is the narration and acting out of the
adventure, at least loosely based on fact, of Stella, a nondescript
office worker who finds herself moving into the world of the glamorous
and glitterati, just because each new power-monger or hanger-on she
encounters takes a liking to her. While the characters she meets are
generally satirised in Leddy's portrayals, Stella never is, and there
is no irony in the assurance that the life she is joining is better
than the one she leaves behind. Meanwhile, with frequent returns, from
various directions, to the song 'Help Me Make It Through The Night,'
Leddy reminds us that loneliness and unhappiness are not the exclusive
property of the poor and obscure, and that comfort in any form is to be
embraced. Leddy is not an overly-polished performer, and it is the
clear sincerity of the piece that carries it, more than the
presentation. Gerald Berkowitz

Andrew J Lederer - Me and HitlerBaby Belly - As the Brooklyn-born
comic cheekily points out from the outset, the title does not
necessarily imply any link between Andrew J Lederer and the dictator,
merely that at some point he'll be talking about himself (extremely
funny) and at another he'll expand on Hitler (highly insightful). On
the personal front, he admits he's already feeling a bit of Edinburgh
burn-out and yet somewhat elated on getting a four-star review. Adolf,
meanwhile, gets (admiring) stick for his schtick in promoting the Third
Reich with Leni Reifenstal's Aryan promo films and the strains of
mood-setting opera. Such is the zeitgeist this year of things
totalitarian that in the audience he discovers the godsend of Dan
Tetsell, a fellow comedian whose show Sins of the Grandfathers delves
into his family's Nazi past. Lederer's habit of eschewing the stage and
roaming the crowd instead means that we had a impromptu double act as
he and Tetsell swapped tales over who has the greater kudos: a relative
who perished in the death camps (Lederer's Jewish) or a grandfather who
was in the SS (those uniforms...). The fun is in watching Lederer as he
gleefully sidetracks and distracts himself over and over again,
frequently from audience prompts, halting the proceedings to insert a
punchline that would otherwise be wasted from the long abandoned
script. The sheer nerve of his hit and miss approach alone makes this
an experience worth catching. Nick Awde

LifeboatAssembly Rooms - Bess lives
in London and dreams of becoming an actress, Beth in Liverpool would
like to be a singer. The plucky teenagers share a love for The Wizard
of Oz and Dorothy's journey into the unknown. But what is about to
unite the girls in real life is the beginning of the Second World War
and their devoted families' hard decision to send them to Canada for
safety away from the bombs. But on the journey across the dangerous
Atlantic, their ship is attacked by the enemy fleet, leaving them
floating on a sinking lifeboat. In flashback, the pair tell us about
their home life, the excitement of knowing they're about to embark on a
great adventure ('Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!') tinged with the
sadness of parting. It makes for an intriguing insight into the
experience of war from the perspective of children. As Suzanne
Robertson, as the sparky Bess, and Isabelle Joss, as the dreamy Beth,
clamber across Karen Tennent's versatile set of rigging, travelling
trunks and Bakelite wireless sets, they give an infectiously energetic
performance in which they also find time to to play each other's
mothers and brothers as well as other evacuees and ship's crew members.
Enjoyable and thoughtful as the production clearly is, it is an oddly
static production that would be more suited as a radio play.
Nick Awde

Lilita Underbelly
- Lilith was the first woman created by God, according to our most
ancient myths. Created from the same dust as Adam, she refused to be a
submissive wife and stormed out of the Garden of Eden, forever branded
a primordial threat to maledom. So God created the fickle but docile
Eve from a rib and the rest is history. And this is 'herstory' - or
'sex, power, demons and victim' as the publicity screams - as Lilith
suddenly becomes Little Red Riding Hood and all of a sudden we find
ourselves in deepest Company of Wolves territory, albeit with more than
a touch of slapstick. A satirical update transforms the characters of
myth and fairy tale into modern celeb - Litlith is now a Lolita called
Lilita, her Riding Hood apple becomes her cherry, her trauma paraded on
a US TV chat show, and Humbert Humbert is 'seductive superstar' Bert
Wolf. Somehow, engineered via several insane twists of logic, a Michael
Jackson-style theme park, a court case in which the audience votes as
the jury, we end up with the Stepford Wives. All that's missing is
Buffy, really. Tracy Keeling, Helen Sadler, Eric Wilson and Nick Cimino
bring life to an insane range of characters in a production that fools
you into thinking it's a throw-away revue before turning into something
far, far darker. Definitely one of the must-sees of the fringe.
Nick Awde

Mark Little in SmartarseAssembly Rooms - Mark Little is a
hard one to review - or easy, depending on how you look it. Affably,
disarmingly, the Aussie comic strolls onstage grinning from ear to ear,
armed only with free cans of beer. Who could fail to be impressed by
such an entrance? And he's been busy this year, what with it being the
20th anniversry of Neighbours - he's just returned from Esinborough to
Edinburgh after reprising his iconic role of Joe Mangel (he claims
it'll help him play Chekhov). In between musings on his fortysomething
life and ours he runs through a slew of other topics that merit our
attention. For example, did you know that the fall of pop and comedy
are linked, inexorably with the rise of Kylie? A self-confessed
Luddite, he eschews the by now standard projector and uses a marker and
the side of an old cardboard box to illustrate the theory. Somehow he
gets away with auctioning a pack of Neighbours-era mugshots to flog on
ebay but then the audience outdoes him by putting up a hundred quid if
he shags a male blow-up doll lurking behind the cardboard box. The
truly bizarre thing is that underneath all this mayhem Little keeps a
firm finger on the political pulse to leave more
than a few lingering thoughts such as Mr Blair and Mr Bush's unholy
alliance and whether they'll let us grow disgracefully old.
Nick Awde

The Little World of Don CamilloValvona and Crolla(reviewed
at a previous Fringe) - Giovanni Guareschi's
stories of a village priest in post-war Italy, first publisdhed in the
1950s, lend themselves ideally to the low-key storytelling styles of
Mike Maran and Philip Contini. Sitting in an authentic-looking grotto
in the rear of an Italian delicatessen, the two take turns standing to
narrate a tale, using minimal props and the natural gestures and
inflections of a storyteller. The running theme of Guareschi's books is
the amicable conflict between the modest priest and the village's
Communist mayor. Sometimes one wins, as when Don Camillo quietly
blackmails the Communists into diverting some of their funds into his
charitable projects; and sometimes the other, as when his attempt to
keep a red-sponsored band out of a religious procession is foiled. More
often, though - and this is the essence of Guareschi's warm comic
vision - the two old friends find themselves on the same side, whether
it is sharing a hunting dog or restoring an angel to the church tower.
It is that quality of warmth and that conviction that good spirits
matter more than politics that the gently ironic styles of Maran and
Contini capture most effectively, supported by musicians Colin Steele
and Martin Green who provide, among other interludes, the unique sound
of Verdi scored for accordion and jazz trumpet. Gerald
Berkowitz

LorileiPleasance Dome (reviewed
in London) - A woman whose
six-year-old son was killed by a paedophile argues against the death
penalty for the murderer. The story is true, the woman exists, and the
script is made up primarily of her own words, spoken by actress Anna
Galvin. Tom Wright's play wears its political agenda openly, but its
strength comes from the purely personal and unpolitical emotional
journey it depicts. Lorelei Guillory tells, in words taken from a BBC
interview, how a mother's immediate pain and rage evolved over a period
of years into the conviction that her son's murderer should not be
executed.. The undeniable authenticity of the experience gives it great
dramatic power, and the only weak moments in the script come when the
author moves away from Lorelei's voice to interpolate material from
trial documents. Director Nicholas Harrington wisely does not attempt
to embellish the raw material, guiding Anna Galvin to sit almost
motionless at a table, narrating her tale in the flattened tones of one
whose emotions have been exhausted by visiting too many hells, with the
only visual distraction being the brief and silent appearance of Gareth
Farley as the murderer. Gerald Berkowitz

Lost OnesPleasance -
A boy who was the only survivor of a mysterious mass death of
schoolkids has grown into a man haunted by the repressed memory, which
takes the form of bizarre dreams, strange half-glimpsed creatures and
beings bursting out of his body. All this is presented in
writer-director Matthew Lenton's staging for the performance company
Vanishing Point as a mix of black comedy and expressionistic horror
story. If you know the recent London productions Shockheaded Peter and
The Pillowman, this lies somewhere between them, with a broad,
over-the-top style similar to the first in service of a psychological
horror story like the second. The problem for me was that both of those
other works affected me, in their different ways, far more than this
one. To be fair, the piece was obviously created for a more congenial
space than the aircraft hangar sized room it was forced at a last
minute to switch to but, except for the occasional effect, like some
very clever work with shadows, this seems more a rather languid
technical exercise than an involving experience, especially when the
mystery, when finally solved, proves irrelevant and anticlimactic. Gerald
Berkowitz

Lost PropertyGilded Balloon Teviot - You go to a
lost-and-found office to search for lost things, so why not lost
people, dreams, chances? That's the premise of this acting/dance/mime
piece by the attractive young company Tangled Feet. With one actor
playing the typically unhelpful clerk, the others take turns seeking
what they have lost - a mother whose children may be dead or just a
fantasy, children who have lost their way, a woman missing a lost
lover. That last one breaks through the clerk's sang-froid since he's
the missing man, and he realises he lost his one chance at happiness
with her. My summary may make the piece seem clearer and more linear
than it is - in performance the various strands are fragmented, and
frequently broken by dance and mime sequences more beautiful in
themselves than advancing the theme. Gerald Berkowitz

Love SickUnderbelly - Boy and girl meet
cute, but he has a super-sensitive sense of smell and can't get too
close to her without becoming sick, while she is terribly nearsighted
and can't see him if he's too far off. On that comic premise, director
Dan Ford and performers Charlotte Riley and Alex Ferguson build a
string of delightfully warm and humourous scenes of love trying
desperately to conquer all. Despite their incompatibility the couple
move in together, arranging the furniture just so and developing a
complex and comic choreography of staying just the right distance
apart, even when eating at the same table. Like any couple, they find
they must make small sacrifices, and so he gives up the flowers he
loves because they make her sneeze, and she forlornly attempts to cover
her natural odour with air fresheners. And, ironically, just when love
does seem to find a way, something new goes wrong, leading to a sweetly
sad ending. It is a slight piece, but a totally charming one and, while
both actors carry the play's warm humour, the hour ultimately belongs
to Charlotte Riley, a physical comedienne of the first order, whose
delightful clowning ranges from shy gawkiness to near-acrobatic
buffoonery. Gerald Berkowitz

LuxuriaSouthside
- Even if you've never been to a dance show before, even if you're not
interested and can't possibly imagine what you might like about it - do
yourself a favour, go to this one! As a dance piece, the Scottish Dance
Theatre's Luxuria is based on a very simple yet immensely effective
enquiry: what happens when you put five women in crinolines and
camisoles together with five soldierly men into a contemporary dance
piece about love, lust and yearning? The result is both visually
enthralling and emotionally enticing. In many ways it is all about
beauty and almost nothing about dance, although in essence
choreographer Liv Lorent does many more favours to dance itself than a
lot of her colleagues. She brings to it all the passion, humour,
imagination and magic that other choreographers have taken away for the
sake of exploring and displaying the technicalities. She brings sex to
ballet and elegance to salsa, she popularises the sublime and ridicules
the frightening. She makes you wonder whether she might have invented
everything there was left to invent and snatched the best of the good
ideas before they all run out for ever. She makes you leave the
auditorium with tears of joy. Duska Radosavljevic